Solving Resource Planning Problems – A Heuristical Solution Julian Eckert Technische Universität Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Lab - KOM Merckstr. 25, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany Julian.Eckert@ kom.tu-darmstadt.de Tim Lehrig Technische Universität Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Lab - KOM Merckstr. 25, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany Tim.Lehrig@ kom.tu-darmstadt.de Apostolos Papageorgiou Technische Universität Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Lab - KOM Merckstr. 25, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany Apostolos.Papageorgiou@ kom.tu-darmstadt.de Nicolas Repp Technische Universität Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Lab - KOM Merckstr. 25, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany Nicolas.Repp@ kom.tu-darmstadt.de Ralf Steinmetz Technische Universität Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Lab - KOM Merckstr. 25, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany Ralf.Steinmetz@ kom.tu-darmstadt.de ABSTRACT Resource planning for service-based workflows becomes cru- cial considering a large amount of workflow execution re- questers in a SOA or Grid environment. Especially, busi- ness process management and performance management of service-based workflows are of high importance avoiding per- formance degradation. The need for efficient resource plan- ning techniques forces intermediaries, acting as workflow or- chestrators, to use efficient heuristics for the determination of service invocation plans for workflows at short computa- tion times. This paper presents an optimization approach for the resource planning problem and proposes an efficient heuristical solution solving the addressed optimization prob- lem at a high solution quality and at a short computation time. Keywords Distributed Workflows, Resource Planning, Service-oriented Computing, Service Composition, Quality of Service 1. INTRODUCTION The globalization and the growing industrialization led enterprises to become very agile and flexible. In particular, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. iiWAS2009, December 14–16, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-660-1/09/0012...$10.00. business processes and workflows have to become very flex- ible and have to be adaptable in various conditions. Due to the increasing competition, enterprises are forced to realize cost-efficient workflows that meet customer requirements. Beside the functional requirements of a business process, also the non-functional requirements are very important. Thus, the provision of a certain Quality of Service (QoS) level as well as an effective business process management is crucial in order to increase the market share of an enterprise. Concerning cross-organizational workflows, i.e., workflows in which services are sourced and invoked from internal as well as from external partners to a single workflow, business process management is necessary for reliable operations [9]. The on-demand integration of external, loosely coupled ser- vices as well as the integration of internal legacy systems is provided by the concept of a Service-oriented Architec- ture (SOA) [8]. Furthermore, SOA represents an approach facilitating the needed flexibility and feasibility in aligning application landscapes to business-driven demands [7]. The general scenario of this paper is the Internet of Ser- vices in which a large variety of services with specific func- tionalities exist that solely vary in their non-functional pa- rameters such as response time, execution capacity, and costs [4]. These services are listed in central or decentral repositories. Furthermore, negotiation of Service Level Agree- ments (SLAs), service monitoring, service pricing, and ser- vice billing are supported. In particular, several roles at a high degree of SOA Maturity [5] are existent such as the service provider, the service consumer, the service interme- diary, the service executor, the platform host as well as a service marketplace. The available services are offered on a big scale on a so-called service marketplace. Julian Eckert, Tim Lehrig, Apostolos Papageorgiou, Nicolas Repp, Ralf Steinmetz: Solving Resource Planning Problems – A Heuristical Solution. In: 11th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Application and Services (iiWAS 2009), p. 348-353, ACM, December 2009. ISBN 978-3-85403-260-1. The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, not withstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.