An Approach for Capacity Planning of Web Service Workflows

Business process management and business process optimization gain more and more importance in recent years. Companies have to meet customer expectations and control IT costs to stay competitive. For this, flexible and agile business processes, efficiently supported by IT systems are crucial. Web Services as an upcoming technology become more and more important establishing cross-organizational workflows. Due to a large amount of incoming requests, it is crucial to plan the workflow control. Furthermore, the resource usage has to be addressed in order to support scalability. Thus, capacity planning mechanisms are crucial for adapting a workflow to the real behavior ensuring that its execution remains feasible and SLA violations due to overload are avoided. Capacity planning requires among others a workload forecast as well as a workload modeling and analysis. Therefore, in this paper we present a holistic capacity planning and cost-effective approach for Web Service workflow parallelization and optimization.