Consistent Runtime Evolution of Service-Based Business Processes

Service-based business processes must evolve to remain aligned with their goals, with zero downtime to guarantee business continuity. A new version of a service should be adopted as soon as it becomes available to let clients benefit from the updated functionality and/or improved quality of service. In practice, however, existing services may be involved in distributed computations that cannot immediately adopt the new versions without suffering inconsistencies. The paper proposes a solution for the consistent runtime evolution of service-based business processes: new service versions can be adopted safely and in a timely fashion, and old versions can be consistently decommissioned. The proposal has been evaluated in the context of an online bank wire transfer example. Our experiments show that the approach is timely in activating service updates, and that the overhead it introduces is negligible.