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Estimating costs of multi-component enterprise applications

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

Estimating the cost of a multi-component application (e.g., its resource or energy consumption) is fundamental in nowadays enterprise IT, especially if we consider that current pricing models are mainly pay per-use. While this is still manageable on small applications, it is really hard to manually estimate the cost of large-scale enterprise applications involving hundreds of interdependent application components. In this article, we formalise the problem of estimating costs of multi-component applications, by representing the structure of an application as a typed directed graph, and by allowing to associate different types of costs with different application components. We show that costs can be fully customised, and that associating different costs with the same application leads to different cost estimation problems defined on that application.We then present an approach for solving cost estimation problems on multi-component applications, which is based on terminating and confluent graph transformations. We also present a prototype implemenation of our approach, which we use to run a case study based on a third-party application.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partly funded by the project “AMaCA” funded by Regione Toscana under the framework POR-FSE 2014-2020, and by the project by “DECLware” (PRA 2018 66) funded by the University of Pisa.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Antonio Brogi, Andrea Corradini & Jacopo Soldani

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  1. Antonio Brogi
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  2. Andrea Corradini
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  3. Jacopo Soldani
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jacopo Soldani.

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Heike Wehrheim

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Brogi, A., Corradini, A. & Soldani, J. Estimating costs of multi-component enterprise applications. Form Asp Comp 31, 421–451 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-019-00491-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-019-00491-2

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