Technical challenges in market-driven automated service provisioning

ABSTRACT

In today's practice, we see readily precomposed commercial service bundles, such as a spam-free email box, consisting of more elementary services like mail storage and a spam-filter. However, these bundles may be suboptimal from the customer's perspective in terms of price and/or the elementary services that constitute the bundle. It would be advantageous to the customer if a service bundle more closely fulfilled the customer's individual requirements, by selecting the most appropriate elementary services included in the bundle. Also, by obtaining the bundle from a consortium of suppliers, rather than just one single supplier, the elementary services of each supplier with the best cost/benefit ratio can be selected. To put this vision into reality, we need middleware facilitating the automated composition of multisupplier bundles out of basic commercial services available online.

We take the stand that the business nature of commercial services imposes leading requirements on the technical design of the middleware. Most importantly, the middleware should be fair in the sense that no single supplier obtains a preferred position in terms of service selection to satisfy a specific customer need. Also, the middleware should be able to deal with alternative services as offered by many competing suppliers, not to speak about the combinatoric explosion, resulting from combining the available services into candidate services bundles. We present a list of problems to be solved to arrive at middleware for multi-supplier service selection, bundling and provisioning. Also, we review existing work, usable to build a fair and efficient middleware solution for commercial service provisioning.

REFERENCES

• 1: Hans Akkermans , Ziv Baida , Jaap Gordijn , Nieves Pena , Ander Altuna , Iñaki Laresgoiti, Value Webs: Using Ontologies to Bundle Real-World Services, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v.19 n.4, p.57-66, July 2004 [doi>10.1109/MIS.2004.35]
• 2: Arno Bakker , Maarten Van Steen , Andrew S. Tanenbaum, A Law-Abiding Peer-to-Peer Network for Free-Software Distribution, Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA'01), p.60, October 08-10, 2001
• 3: L. Baresi, E. D. Nitto, C. Ghezzi, and S. Guinea. A framework for the deployment of adaptable web service compositions. Service Oriented Computing and Applications, 1(1):75--91, 2007.
• 4: H. Bastiaansen and P. Hermans. Managing agility through service orientation in an open telecommunication value chain. IEEE Communications Magazine, 44(10):86--95, October 2006.
• 5: Scott Buffett , Bruce Spencer, A Decision Procedure for Bundle Purchasing with Incomplete Information on Future Prices, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, v.8 n.4, p.131-144, Number 4/Summer 2004
• 6: Antonio Carzaniga , David S. Rosenblum , Alexander L. Wolf, Design and evaluation of a wide-area event notification service, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.19 n.3, p.332-383, Aug. 2001 [doi>10.1145/380749.380767]
• 7: B. N. Dunn. Icann's levy from price increases imposed on europeans (h-0126/07). http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=CRE&reference=20070315&secondRef=ANN-01&language=EN&detail=H-2007-0126&query=QUESTION, 15 March 2007. European Parliament, Strasbourg.
• 8: C. Grönroos. Service Management and Marketing: A Customer Relationship Management Approach, 2nd edition. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, 2000.
• 9: Ahmad Kardan , Hamed Janzadeh, A Multi-issue Negotiation Mechanism with Interdependent Negotiation Issues, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Digital Society, p.55-59, February 10-15, 2008 [doi>10.1109/ICDS.2008.35]
• 10: Sybren Kinderen , Jaap Gordijn, Reasoning about Substitute Choices and Preference Ordering in e-Services, Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, June 16-20, 2008 [doi>10.1007/978-3-540-69534-9_30]
• 11: U. Küster, B. König-Ries, M. Klein, and M. Stern. Diane: A matchmaking-centered framework for automated service discovery, composition, binding, and invocation on the web. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 12(2):42--67, 2007.
• 12: C. Lovelock. Services Marketing, People, Technology, Strategy, 4th edition. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2001.
• 13: Ratul Mahajan , Maya Rodrig , David Wetherall , John Zahorjan, Experiences applying game theory to system design, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Practice and theory of incentives in networked systems, September 03-03, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1016527.1016531]
• 14: Thomas W. Malone , Joanne Yates , Robert I. Benjamin, Electronic markets and electronic hierarchies, Communications of the ACM, v.30 n.6, p.484-497, June 1987 [doi>10.1145/214762.214766]
• 15: R. Normann. Service Management: Strategy and Leadership in Service Business. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, 3rd edition, 2001.
• 16: T. O'Reilly. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html, September 2005.
• 17: Thomi Pilioura , Georgios-Dimitrios Kapos , Aphrodite Tsalgatidou, PYRAMID-S: A Scalable Infrastructure for Semantic Web Service Publication and Discovery, Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Research Issues on Data Engineering: Web Services for E-Commerce and E-Government Applications (RIDE'04), p.15-22, March 28-29, 2004
• 18: S. Stremersch and G. J. Tellis. Strategic bundling of products and prices: A new synthesis for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 66(January):55--72, 2002.
• 19: Kunal Verma , Kaarthik Sivashanmugam , Amit Sheth , Abhijit Patil , Swapna Oundhakar , John Miller, METEOR-S WSDI: A Scalable P2P Infrastructure of Registries for Semantic Publication and Discovery of Web Services, Information Technology and Management, v.6 n.1, p.17-39, January 2005 [doi>10.1007/s10799-004-7773-4]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems

  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures

  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.0 General

General Terms:
Design, Economics

Keywords:
commercial services, service bundles, service provisioning