The CHAMPS system: change management with planning and scheduling

TLDR

Change management modifies IT systems for fixes, upgrades, and performance enhancements, yet current systems rely on administrators to supply necessary insights, which is often lacking. The paper introduces the CHAMPS prototype, a change‑management system with integrated planning and scheduling developed at IBM Research. CHAMPS exploits runtime dependency knowledge to parallelize tasks and uses optimization techniques that produce high‑quality solutions to intractable scheduling problems in time that scales with problem size. Implementation of CHAMPS in a TPC‑W online bookstore environment demonstrates its practical applicability.

Abstract

Change management is a process by which IT systems are modified to accommodate considerations such as software fixes, hardware upgrades and performance enhancements. This paper discusses the CHAMPS system, a prototype under development at IBM Research for Change Management with Planning and Scheduling. The CHAMPS system is able to achieve a very high degree of parallelism for a set of tasks by exploiting detailed factual knowledge about the structure of a distributed system from dependency information at runtime. In contrast, today's systems expect an administrator to provide such insights, which is often not the case. Furthermore, the optimization techniques we employ allow the CHAMPS system to come up with a very high quality solution for a mathematically intractable problem in a time which scales nicely with the problem size. We have implemented the CHAMPS system and have applied it in a TPC-W environment that implements an on-line book store application.