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Generating Project Plans for Data Center Transformations

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AI 2012: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7691))

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Abstract

Operations of modern organizations critically depend on Data Centers (DC). Due to ad hoc additions from diverse business units over time, the IT resources in a DC get unwieldy and complex. Transformations of DC - server consolidation, migration, application/data simplification, technology standardization - are important for cost, efficiency and reliability. Even when a specific transformation is identified (“consolidate these 100 existing servers into these 48 new servers”) it is difficult to generate a detailed optimal project plan for its execution. The project plan must identify all the tasks involved, identify an optimal team (size and expertise) and generate a detailed work schedule that meets the and respects the constraints and dependencies among the tasks. We present a methodology to generate such a plan automatically from given ”high-level” IT transformation specifications (“as-is” and “to-be” states). We adopt a heuristic forward chaining metric temporal planner engine (SAPA) to generate a project plan that attempts to optimize the overall time and team-size. The idea is to capture the domain-knowledge as reusable planning action. This automation reduces the efforts and errors in manual project planning. The method can be extended to projects in other domains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC), Tata Consultancy Services Limited, 54B, Hadapsar Industrial Estate, Pune, 411013, India

    Amrit Lal Ahuja & Girish Keshav Palshikar

Authors
  1. Amrit Lal Ahuja
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  2. Girish Keshav Palshikar
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, 2052, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Michael Thielscher

  2. School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Western Sydney, 1797, Penrith South DC, NSW, Australia

    Dongmo Zhang

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ahuja, A.L., Palshikar, G.K. (2012). Generating Project Plans for Data Center Transformations. In: Thielscher, M., Zhang, D. (eds) AI 2012: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7691. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35101-3_65

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35101-3_65

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35100-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35101-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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