Services modeling and distributed simulation DEVS / HLA supported

Nowadays, Service design and development is more than ever key challenge for enterprises. Nevertheless, the set up of new services activities is not entirely formalized and guided by a clear methodology or commonly recognized standard. These facts can lead on wrong services definitions and practices that penalize the enterprise, in particular in the case this evidence arrive late. The idea introduced in this prospective paper is to model and simulate services before realizing them in order to validate desired properties and anticipate wrong behavior. Considering this proposal, a problem appears: no whole part of the service (actors, software, machines) can be included in the model, real actors are wanted to act in the loop. In addition, the simulation requires to interoperate and synchronize with heterogeneous and distributed actors of the service. The goal of the paper is to present a Service Modeling Environment based on a graphical Service Modeling Specification language and on Distributed DEVS Simulation. Having selected the essential concepts in the elaboration of Service Modeling, we present a description language to define Service Modeling processes. Then, we describe a method to transform Service Modeling specifications into simulation models; DEVS formalism is chosen for its formal properties. Based on the experience of distributed simulation, we propose to address the interoperability by conforming to the distributed simulation standard HLA. Finally, we define a distributed Service Modeling Environment that interfaces components of the Service Models and others actors in HLA compliant Federation.