A metamodel for modeling cost behavior in service composition

During the service composition lifecycle, service costs should be predicted, controlled and reported in order to optimize resource utilization and increase profit. Several approaches have been proposed to address cost issues in some phases of the service composition lifecycle. However, each approach expresses costs in its own way, which makes it hard to integrate them into a comprehensive and automated approach that tackles cost issues throughout the service composition lifecycle. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a metamodel for expressing costs in service compositions. The proposed metamodel allows designers to express different cost behaviors and to enforce them throughout the service composition lifecycle. In addition to the metamodel, the paper also discusses the tools have been specially designed and implemented to support this metamodel. In order to evaluate the metamodel, we performed a case study in which cost results calculated with the proposed tools are compared with results obtained in a conventional way. Moreover, we describe some cost behaviors of real web service to evaluate the applicability of our metamodel.