Metodologia de modelagem e implementação de blockchain em processos de negócio

Abstract

Blockchain is a recent technology known to be widely used in cryptocurrency transactions. This technology became popular with Bitcoin but has recently been applied in many areas, including solutions in healthcare, financial transactions, and food traceability. Blockchain is defined as an immutable ledger, where systems can store transactions, documents, data generated in processes for historical use, among others. Due to its popularity and characteristics, Blockchain has been used to support the area of business process management. In this context, Blockchains can be used for auditability and integrity of the data generated by processes, thus providing greater security that this data reflects the modeled process and has never been altered. The inclusion of information in a Blockchain typically goes through a set of rules, called Smart Contracts. It is a technology embedded in Blockchains, which, when combined with tasks of a business process, can provide guarantees of reliability that an executed task has not been altered. In this application context, this research presents a methodology for implementing Blockchain based on the need to redesign a process or even change business rules of a process task. The research aims to help implement Blockchains and Smart Contracts in legacy systems that wish to integrate this technology into the process that the system executes. The main objective of this work is to propose a methodology to assist in the implementation and evolution of Blockchains whenever a process is redesigned. The proposal was evaluated through prototyping and application in a case study involving the certification process of poultry breeding farms in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. It was concluded that through the evaluation, it was possible to observe how a business process can undergo changes and evolutions even when using Blockchain and Smart Contracts by following the steps outlined in the methodology proposed by this work.