| The objective of the proposed research is to design and validate advanced techniques for the adaptive and hierarchical bundling of commercial IT services that match consumer needs. An IT service is a commercial service that can be ordered and provisioned on-line, by which the provider earns money. We envisage a scenario where a consumer need is analyzed on-line, leading to the dynamic creation of a value constellation of independent businesses which jointly offer a service bundle that satisfies the consumer need. The bundle is composed from web services offered by the businesses in the value constellation. Subsequent occurrences of the same need will be provided by the same value constellation, unless quality of service drops below the level required by the consumer. Quality of service will therefore be continuously monitored and the constellation can be dynamically reconfigured, if required. Our work differs from dynamic web service composition approaches, because we use a value modeling approach in which we build a value model to analyze economic sustainability of a value constellation. We then use the value model to configure a coordination process that builds the required service bundle from web services offered by the participating businesses at the required quality of service. We will use skeleton planning to configure the value and process models. We will work with our industry partners to deliver experimental prototypes that automatically configure a service bundle, monitor its delivery, and reconfigure it when necessary. We will do real-life case studies to validate our results. |
