Estimating the cost of a multi-component application (e.g., its resource or energy consumption) is fundamental in nowadays enterprise IT, especially if we consider that current pricing models are mainly pay per-use. While this is still manageable on small applications, it is really hard to manually estimate the cost of large-scale enterprise applications involving hundreds of interdependent application components. In this article, we formalise the problem of estimating costs of multi-component applications, by representing the structure of an application as a typed directed graph, and by allowing to associate different types of costs with different application components. We show that costs can be fully customised, and that associating different costs with the same application leads to different cost estimation problems defined on that application.We then present an approach for solving cost estimation problems on multi-component applications, which is based on terminating and confluent graph transformations. We also present a prototype implemenation of our approach, which we use to run a case study based on a third-party application.

中文翻译：

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估算多组件企业应用程序的成本

估算多组件应用程序的成本（例如，它的资源或能源消耗）是当今企业 IT 的基础，尤其是当我们考虑到当前的定价模型主要是按使用付费时。虽然这在小型应用程序上仍然是可以管理的，但是很难手动估计涉及数百个相互依赖的应用程序组件的大型企业应用程序的成本。在本文中，我们通过将应用程序的结构表示为类型化的有向图，并允许将不同类型的成本与不同的应用程序组件相关联，从而形式化了估计多组件应用程序成本的问题。我们展示了成本可以完全定制，并且将不同成本与同一应用程序相关联会导致在该应用程序上定义不同的成本估算问题。然后，我们提出了一种解决多组件应用程序成本估算问题的方法，该方法基于终止和汇合图转换。我们还展示了我们方法的原型实现，我们用它来运行基于第三方应用程序的案例研究。