Abstract
Businesses are under increasing pressure to quickly and flexibly adapt their business processes to external and internal software and other changes. Furthermore, to address the rapid change and deployment of software functionality, microservices have emerged as a popular architectural style for partitioning business logic into small services accessible with lightweight mechanisms, resulting in a higher degree of dynamic integration of information services with processes. Current process-aware information systems tend to rely on manually pre-configured static process models and during process enactment exhibit challenges in reacting to unforeseen dynamic changes. This paper presents Microflows, an automatic lightweight declarative approach for the workflow-centric orchestration of semantically-annotated microservices using agent-based clients, graph-based methods, and the lightweight semantic vocabularies JSON-LD and Hydra. A case study shows approach’s advantages for automating workflow modeling and enactment in a dynamic microservice environment.
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The author thanks Florian Sorg and Sebastian Stigler for their assistance with the design, implementation, evaluation, and diagrams.
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Oberhauser, R. (2017). Microflows: Automated Planning and Enactment of Dynamic Workflows Comprising Semantically-Annotated Microservices. In: Shishkov, B. (eds) Business Modeling and Software Design. BMSD 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 275. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57222-2_9
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