Profitability and cost management of trustworthy composite services

Building business solutions may require combining multiple existing services. In SOA paradigm this can be achieved using composite services. Composite services may be in turn recursively composed with other services into higher level solutions. The number of component services that need to be aggregated may be large and dynamically changing. Additionally, the component services may vary in their trustworthiness and cost and in their importance to the value of the composite service. Therefore, determining and maintaining the optimal composition in terms of its short-term and long-term profitability and building and expanding consumer base for composite service providers are challenging goals especially in the competitive business service environments. This paper addresses how to create profitable, consumer-focused and trustworthy composite services through optimising pricing and managing the cost and the trustworthiness of those services. The techniques described support consumer differentiation, prioritisation of offered services and dynamic capacity-dependent component charging.