Provisioning of Service Mashup Topologies
Benjamin Blau, Wibke Michalk, Dirk Neumann, Christof Weinhardt · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2008
Service-orientation has gained great momentum in technological and economical matter. This development forces companies to drive new strategies such as service differentiation, coopetition and engaging into dynamic service ecosystems. Traditional ideas of static value chains give way to agile service value networks where many decentralized service providers compete and cooperate in the creation of value added mashed-up services. Nevertheless, there is a lack of efficient ways to design service mashups considering service configurations, interrelations and incompatibilities. There is a necessity to foster flexible allocation of sub-services and dynamic pricing. Currently, services are mostly charged statically via flat fees or pay-per-use prices. This is controversial because especially in short-living environments as service markets, there is a great demand for mechanisms providing dynamic sub-service reallocation and overall price determination. We present an ontology framework which is integrated into a tool that supports service intermediaries in the design process of service networks. These networks represent possible instantiations of a value added mashed-up services formed by various decentralized service providers. Based on this, we provide an application of a path auction with a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves and a Low-PaymentMechanism to determine the price of mashups. We evaluate proposed mechanisms exploring different graph topologies and bid strategies.