Towards a Hybrid Simulation Modelling Framework for Service Networks

摘要

The increasingly globalized service-centric economy has brought much attention on the concept of service networks. Scientific disciplines, such as management and service oriented computing, have commenced studying on how to design, develop, manage, and govern service networks. What is really needed for service networks to be developed, provisioned and managed in practice, however, are disciplined methods and tools that are able to take into account, tune and reconcile both technical and business considerations. This paper may be seen as a first, yet critical step in realizing the above vision. In particular, this paper explores a hybrid service network simulation approach that is able to analyze, optimize and tune the performance of service networks and their resources, including software services and human operated services. Our holistic, hybrid simulation framework will be firmly grounded on pre-existing simulation techniques that have been widely used in process modelling and simulation.