Supporting Service Management with Graph-based Service System Visualization, Manipulation and Analysis

The ability to establish and maintain connections to business partners has become a critical success factor in many businesses. Service-oriented architectures are being intensively discussed as an enabler on both business- and technical level.
The management of services in a SOA requires comprehensive information about the managed services. Several approaches for unified service descriptions emerged, e.g. the Unified Service Description Language. Even small service systems can comprise a considerable number of different services, relationships and resources, which in turn requires (semi-)automated means supporting the analysis and manipulation. This paper builds on the Unified Service Description Language and derives a model for the graph-based visualization, manipulation and analysis of service systems. The proposed model supports service management tasks, including but not limited to redundancy detection and documentation, make-or-buy simulations and service costing. The results are prototypically implemented and applied to a case example from the financial services industry.