Business Service Scheduling

The management and predictive planning of the processes to create business services is more difficult than the planning of production processes, because services cannot be produced in stock and customers are involved in their creation. In this paper, the author proposes a method for service scheduling and optimization based on an ontology to describe business services and related concepts. The author schedules operations required to create a service. With each service process and its operations, soft and hard constraints on the execution of operations and the required resources are posted. These constraints are derived from service level agreements. A legal plan must then satisfy all hard constraints. All soft constraints are matter of optimization. Using a tabu search, a near-optimal solution of the service scheduling problem is achieved. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0267-0.ch019