Optimization of Business Process Execution in Services Architecture: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Web services have become a standard way to provide functions of information systems. The number of web services grows rapidly with the increasing popularity of microservices architecture. In consequence, many business processes are executed entirely through web services. Therefore, optimizing the performance of business process execution may bring many benefits. There are many optimization methods in this area. Our systematic literature review aims to introduce available methods to researchers interested in the optimization of business process execution. We queried four databases: ACM, IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, and Springer. Out of 12150 initially found papers, we have selected 128 for the review. We have grouped methods presented in those papers into three stages of business process optimization: Resource Allocation, Service Composition, and Service Scheduling. Service Composition attracts the largest group of researchers with a vast majority of 119 articles in it. Moreover, the most popular are genetic algorithms. In general, researchers mainly propose heuristic methods that optimize business processes during run-time. We see the potential for further exploration at both Resource Allocation and Service Scheduling stages.

Integration Flows Modeling in the Context of Architectural Views

“…Thus, they exploit services from multiple systems. Górski and Woźniak [21] show that SOA and microservices may help in optimizing the execution of business processes into three areas: Resource Allocation, Service Composition, and Service Scheduling. The most popular are genetic algorithms that are used to optimize business processes during runtime.…”

Containerized Microservices Orchestration and Provisioning in Cloud Computing: A Conceptual Framework and Future Perspectives

“…Górski and Woźniak [40] conducted a thorough evaluation of the literature on the optimization of business process execution in services architecture. They classified the A microservices tracing and analytical tool (JCallGraph) to analyze the invocation relationship of microservices running on containers was designed by Liu [35] for the Chinese e-commerce company JD.com (having approximately 34,000 microservices running on a cluster of 500,000 containers, supporting over 250 billion RPC-based microservices calls per day).…”

“…Górski and Woźniak [40] conducted a thorough evaluation of the literature on the optimization of business process execution in services architecture. They classified the methodologies in the existing literature into three categories, resource allocation, service composition, and service scheduling, and discovered that service composition draws the most researchers.…”

Developing Microservice-Based Applications Using the Silvera Domain-Specific Language

“…An approach for execution time and energy efficient service composition is presented by Li et al in [21]. The order of service tasks execution is determined by a service scheduling [22]. Resource allocation is another important process that affects the performance.…”

“…Resource allocation is another important process that affects the performance. The goal of resource allocation is to select resources for component instances and determine the number of component instances needed to meet performance and reliability requirements [22]. Usually, microservices have more components with less functionality that require fewer resources.…”