A System Dynamics Approach to Web Service Capacity Management

This paper presents a dynamic simulation model applied within the field of web services capacity management. The main purpose of the model is to help manage the web services capacity that providers assign their customers accordingly so as to ensure the fulfillment of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) established.Therefore, the model allows for the analysis of the effects of different web services capacity management polices on the service performance and on the penalties to be assumed by providers for non-compliance with the response times agreed with their customers. The main aims of the sensitivity analysis carried out in the case study of this research paper are as follows: (1) to assess the fulfillment of the SLAs according to the web service capacity contracted by the customer, (2) to determine the lowest web service capacity and those capacity management parameters that ensure that the actual service performance is the one that has been agreed on (3) to evaluate the penalties that the web service provider should assume for non-compliance with response times.