Early assessment of service performance based on simulation

Accurate and rapid evaluation of web service performance is a key problem of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), where services are continuously being (re-)designed and released, and integrated within heterogeneous environments. Unfortunately, pre-deployment testing of services is not suitable to evaluate service performance at both design time and runtime. As a result, often process designers get a reliable assessment of service performance only very late in the lifecycle, once services have been deployed, while customers cannot evaluate service behavior at selection time. In this paper we tackle these problems by proposing a methodology that generates a simulation script that can be used for an early assessment of service performance, and to negotiate and evaluate SLAs on service performance at runtime.