Aggregating Price Models for Composite Services in Cloud Service Marketplaces

Marketplaces for cloud services, referred to as electronic marketplaces (eMPs), have been introduced for a number of purposes, including comparability and transparency of service offerings. Since the complexity of services and their provisioning is increasing, eMPs need to handle the dynamic and automated creation of composite services, i.e. services which are yielded in part by using third-party services available on the marketplace. To meet this requirement, eMPs need a standardized machine readable description of service offerings. This paper presents an approach to define price models for services traded on eMPs, using a subset of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL). To enable composite service pricing, this paper introduces an approach on the aggregation of several price models into one price model and analyses the time complexity of the price aggregation algorithm presented.