Simulation of IT service processes with petri-nets

Abstract

Due to a steadily increasing market for IT services, providers need to set apart from their competitors in order to successfully assert with their service offerings in the market. As a result the improvement of the quality of service process provisioning is becoming a major aspect. In this paper we propose a Petri-net based approach in order to model and simulate service processes in terms of availability levels. Supported by a tool service providers can perform a priori estimations during design time on the potential impact and interaction of availabilities of services involved in provisioning processes. We additionally show how obtained results can be taken into account for negotiating availability levels in Service Level Agreements (SLA). © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.