Supporting the Evolution of Event-Based Choreographies of BPMN Fragments in Microservices Environments

Business Processes (BPs) describe how organizations should perform to achieve their goals. Many times, these BPs are defined and executed in a decentralized way, which forces organizations to find mechanisms to achieve coordination in their processes. Within this context, microservice-based architectures are offered as a solution to achieve this coordination. To maintain a lower coupling between different microservices supporting these distributed BPs, this type of architecture proposes using event-based choreographies. Nevertheless, this distribution makes it hard to analyse the business requirements of the composition since the flow is split among different microservices. Our prior work addresses this by using BPMN diagrams for microservices composition, executing it through an event-based BPMN fragment choreography. In this work, we aim to support the evolution of a BP choreography when changes occur from the local perspective of a microservice by automatically selecting adaptation actions to maintain the functional integrity of the composition. To achieve this, we have formally defined our microservices approach and a catalogue of adaptation rules. These rules have been automated by integrating a new microservice implementing an MAPE-K control loop into the application. This extended architecture was successfully evaluated in a user experiment.