Ontologies and their associated mappings play a central role in several decision support systems. However, by virtue of knowledge evolution, ontology entities are modified over time impacting mappings and potentially turning them invalid. This requires methods to maintain such semantic correspondences up-to-date at ontology evolution time. In this article, we present the design and formalization of original heuristics that drive the adaptation of ontology mappings. Our approach takes into account the definition of established mappings, the evolution of ontologies and the possible changes that can be applied to mappings. This study experimentally evaluates the proposed heuristics on realistic case studies borrowed from the biomedical domain by assessing their validity on official set of mappings.