Dynamic Service Provisioning: A User--Centric Approach

The paradigm shift to service management opens a new dimension in management. In this paper we address the issue of dynamic service provisioning. The vision is that users would be able to review a set of services or service packages, select or customize a package, whereupon a service provider checks the request, clicks an "execute" button, and the services are turned on, monitored and managed. Such a vision is hard to achieve. A first step towards dynamic service provisioning is to develop a framework for a service provisioning system (SPS). The key issues of the framework are (i) the concept of a service template, and (ii) the idea of looking at a service template as a case and applying case-based reasoning method