On Elasticity and Constrainedness of Business Services Provisioning

In service-oriented enterprise architecture, provisioning business services is made on top of IT processes, which should be elastic amid the availability of computing resources and the variation of user demand. In addition, the provisioning depends on human resources utilized and is constrained by the business objectives (e.g. a goal) plus coarse-grained constraints (e.g. an order in which business services take place). This elasticity and constrainedness can best be witnessed on nonfunctional properties of the business services being provisioned. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for modeling and reasoning about them. The framework features a methodology for formally expressing the aforementioned factors in services provisioning, an engine to find solutions and a simulation.