Exploring continuous optimization solutions for business-driven IT management problems

Business-driven IT management practices often involve the performance optimization of a system according to business criteria. The increased attention to dynamical aspects of the system behavior, the preference for simulative approaches rather than analytical ones, and the increased level of complexity posed by business-driven performance evaluation significantly complicate the optimization of BDIM systems and demand a radical rethinking of methodologies and tools. This raises the opportunity to devise and implement common methodology and tools that could be used for a large class of different BDIM optimization problems. This paper proposes a generic framework for the dynamic and adaptive optimization of BDIM systems, introduces the Open Source ruby-mhl metaheuristics library, and provides an experimental evaluation in the context of a realistic case study.