Recourse aware resource allocation for contingency planning in distributed service delivery

Remote delivery of services using geographically distributed service delivery locations has emerged as a popular and viable business model. Examples of services delivered in this manner are software services, business process outsourcing services, customer support centers, etc. The very nature of services and the fragile nature of the business environments in some of the delivery locations accentuates the need for business continuity. A key aspect of enabling business continuity is, at the time of a disruptive event, ability to reroute the services delivered from affected locations to unaffected locations while meeting their resource requirements. Such rerouting is called recourse. We highlight the need for recourse aware resource allocation. We study this problem from a computational viewpoint, present a new recourse aware resource allocation heuristic, and experimentally compare this to traditional resource allocation methods.