The Impact of Service Pricing Models on Service Selection

• Main Authors: Eckert, J., Ertogrul, D., Papageorgiou, A., Repp, N., Steinmetz, R.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Context-aware services; Contracts; Costs; Material storage; Pricing; Pricing Models; Quality of service; Research and development; Resource management; Service oriented architecture; Service Selection; SOA; Web services
• DOI: 10.1109/ICIW.2009.53

Pricing of services, especially in a SOA and grid environment with contractual relationships gain importance in recent years. For the resource planning, i.e. the allocation and orchestration of existing services, service pricing has a major influence. An orchestrator of services may face various pricing models from different service providers with e.g. long-term or short-term contracts, fixed or variable expenses for service invocation. Price as an important non-functional property of services lacks of a systematic investigation in this context, although it directly affects a service orchestrator's business targets. An appropriate categorization of pricing models is essential for this purpose. This paper proposes a classification of pricing models for services in a SOA environment from a resource planning perspective, i.e. for service selection. Moreover, the impact of different pricing models on service allocation, respectively selection, and further implications for an intermediary, acting as a service orchestrator, are presented.