Application Placement with Constraint Relaxation

Novel utility computing paradigms rely upon the deployment of multi-service applications to pervasive and highly distributed cloud-edge infrastructure resources. Deciding onto which computational nodes to place services in cloud-edge networks, as per their functional and nonfunctional constraints, can be formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem. Most existing solutions in this space are not able to deal with unsatisfiable problem instances, nor preferences, i.e., requirements that DevOps may agree to relax to obtain a solution. In this article, we exploit Answer Set Programming optimisation capabilities to tackle this problem. Experimental results in simulated settings show that our approach is effective on lifelike networks and applications.