Using mixed integer programming to schedule it change requests

Abstract

Change management is viewed as one of the most important processes in IT management with the main challenge of scheduling the change requests. That is, given a set of change requests for different parts of an IT system, how one should schedule changes to minimize the costs and risks of service delivery. In this paper, we approach the change request scheduling problem using a simple optimization model and consider both deterministic and stochastic cases. We show that these models can be converted to the Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) framework for which promising solution techniques exist. We conclude the work with an illustrative example as an instance of our model. ©2008 IEEE.