Cost-Minimizing Service Selection in the Presence of End-to-End QoS Constraints and Complex Charging Models

The composition of services allows for achieving complex business requirements on top of already existing functionality, potentially procured from third party providers. Facing a growing market of services, enterprises have to select the most appropriate services to support their service compositions. Beside functional attributes the service selection is driven by nonfunctional properties like the price or the quality of a service. Taken into account quantity discounts, bundle effects, and subscription-based charging, complex service charging models are discussed in the literature of service marketing. Dynamic and complex charging models are expected to play an important role in the future service industry. Therefore, a service selection has to deal with those complex charging models in order to obtain a cost minimizing composition of services. In this paper, we present a cost minimizing service selection model based on mathematical programming that considers complex service charging models found in the literature. In addition to a pure cost minimizing point of view, the proposed model also takes into account end-to-end constrained quality of service (QoS) attributes like the execution time of service compositions. The conducted computational experiments demonstrate that the approach is applicable to solve problem instances of reasonable size.