Technical challenges in market-driven automated service provisioning
Anna Chmielowiec, Guillaume Pierre, Jaap Gordijn, Maarten R. van Steen · 2008
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.