SERSCIS

In July 2010, IT Innovation produced proof-of-concept (PoC) service management components that were capable of managing a scenario involving collaborative decision making in an airport environment. These components were integrated into a PoC testbed that has been evaluated by AustroControl and KEMEA.

Since then, IT Innovation has been developing refined service management components that include the following features:

• a rationalised architecture, with respect to resources (has capacity) and services (uses resources, has no intrinsic capacity);
• a means to express the relationship between supplier commitments and resource capacity, and to aggregate resource capacity;
• a means to express the relationship between customer commitments and resource requirements, and to aggregate resource requirements;
• a means to compare aggregated resource capacity to resource requirements and to initiate management actions that aim to correct any imbalance;
• a means to encode the triggers in management policies, which are distributed throughout the management layer — all management objects are capable of storing and evaluating policies, which act both on other management objects (e.g. an SLA) and on managed objects (e.g. a service); and
• a means for the resource manager to store the relevant information (e.g. QoS and QoE data) in a registry that provides a way for application components to find the most appropriate resources to provide a service.

The updated governance components will be integrated into the full validation testbed by June 2011. Through this integration, we anticipate that the full testbed will support scenarios involving context-driven resource optimisation and advanced policy-based management that allows a service provider to exercise control over supply-chain interdependencies.

The figure to the left illustrates these service interdependencies using the example of a Ground Handler offering a Ground Handling service to airlines, which it provides by orchestrating a number of Ramp Services. The relationships between the customer (airline) and the suppliers (ramp services) are captured in service level agreements (SLAs). In the example, the catering service is provided by an external third party, while the cleaning service is provided by the same organisation as the ground handler. However, these can be modelled identically, thereby simplifying the management model. Further details of the service management framework can be found in this paper.