Service-Oriented Resource Management

Service management controls how business services are developed and delivered to customers. Business services must be flexible negotiable between customer and provider. Temporal attributes are important and in most cases resources are involved and for customer satisfaction as well as for efficient usage an optimization of resources is required. Often business services are aggregated from services from different organizations. To enable efficient construction, basic services and the information content should be standardized as far as possible without constraining the flexibility. This paper presents an approach and a prototypical implementation to search, reserve and book resources based on Web services. Groups of resources are managed by an organization´s information system which contains a database for storing the expected usage of the resources and some business logic expressed by means of explicit business rules. A distributed resource management system uses the Web services to build up a complex service for customers asking for different resources. This architecture is applicable in many domains. As a showcase, we use the organization of facilities for a scientific conference.