Service Network Modeling: A Generic Approach Aneta Kabzeva (B ) , Joachim G¨ otze, and Paul M¨ uller Integrated Communication Systems Lab (ICSY), University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany {kabzeva,j goetze,pmueller}@informatik.uni-kl.de Abstract. With the broad adoption of service-orientation for the real- ization of business applications and their provisioning and usage over open cloud infrastructures, the topology of the resulting service networks is becoming extremely complex. Due to the composition of services for value-added business capabilities and the reusability of a service in mul- tiple compositions, the execution of one service often depends on other services and changes in its provisioning can affect the health of large parts of the service network. The lack of insight on the relationships between the network components makes the management of the service network’s health and change impact hard and error prone tasks. This paper proposes a service network modeling approach for capturing the topology of a service network at design time. The model is used to val- idate the health of the service network to ensure the operability of its services. At run time the model can be applied for analyzing the effects of evolutionary events such as service modification or withdrawal. Our major contributions are a generic and adaptable modeling structure and a classification of service network entities and relationships. The applica- bility of our approach is demonstrated on an example service network scenario. Keywords: Service network · Service network model · Adaptability · Service network health analysis 1 Introduction With the adoption of service-orientation as paradigm for the development of business applications and the introduction of cloud infrastructures, the organi- zation of today’s IT landscapes is changing. Organizations are focusing on their core competency. Supporting non-core functionality is consumed on demand as third-party services in the cloud [16]. The resulting sophisticated relations between services of different vendors and consumers connect the IT landscape in a complex value co-creation service network [15]. Since the structure of a network always affects its functionality [23], the modeling of service networks as an instrument for understanding the complex interactions between the actors and the resources in a service network is an emerging research field in service science [22]. Based on a comprehensive service c  Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 G. Ortiz and C. Tran (Eds.): ESOCC 2014, CCIS 508, pp. 39–50, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-14886-1 5