Cost management of service composition

Many organisations across the world have adopted Service-Oriented Architecture
(SOA) to interconnect their computing infrastructures (Business-to-
Business) and offer interfaces to their customers (Business-to-Customer).
SOA can help these organisations access the market more quickly, respond
to changes in a business environment, improve business processes and customers services and even reduce costs. In SOA, service composition has
emerged as an important strategy to enable collaboration of applications provided by different organisations (Business-to-Business). With the increasing
number of Web services having similar functionality but different pricing
schemes, choosing the most appropriate set of services with the lowest cost
has been a challenge in service compositions. In our exploratory literature review
to identify the challenges and current concepts related to the treatment
of the cost of service compositions, we observed the existence of several
approaches to manage costs in Service-Oriented Computing (SOC). However,
most of these approaches cannot cope with complex cost behaviours.
Moreover, we did not find any solution that treats cost throughout the service
composition life-cycle. Thus, the main objective of this thesis has been to develop a framework to manage cost throughout the service composition lifecycle
in an integrated way, taking into account all classes of cost behavior and all types of cost drivers. To achieve this objective, we first provided a metamodel to express cost behaviours of computational services by taking into account some characteristics of SOA and service cost, such as that services can have a particular cost for each operation and that service costs can have several types of cost drivers. In addition, we developed algorithms to analyse the cost of service compositions and atomic services. Additionally, we proposed an architecture for developing software environment that are able to manage the cost throughout the service composition life-cycle. Finally, we implemented a prototype based on the proposed architecture and performed simulations that show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach to manage the cost of service composition.