Model-Based IT Change Management for Large System Definitions with State-Related Dependencies

A change process in already deployed system requires its components to step through a few temporary states before they reach their desired states, however, most prevalent IT resource management tools seldom assume such temporary states. Therefore, the tools are not applicable to the change management of already deployed systems, particularly those that consist of hardware components. This paper addresses the above concerns and describes a model-based management scheme for changing IT systems including the hardware resources. Our approach automatically generates the required tasks to apply changes from a desired state model with staterelated dependencies between the resources. The contributions of the paper include: (1) a simple base methodology of task planning for system changes with our desired state model, (2) a component-based system model to define desired states in largescale systems, and (3) enhancement of task planning scalability for a number of managed resources. We present specifications to define a system change efficiently with two versions of state models: current state and desired state. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system change definition scheme through case studies and validate the scalability of our approach by measuring the processing time of task planning.