Cost Control in Service Composition Environments

This paper investigates requirements and proposes solutions for charging of composite services. An analysis of the relations between the service user, service broker and service provider with respect to charging suggests that the price a service broker asks from the user of a composite service is in general decoupled from the price the service broker pays to the service providers of the component services used to create the composite service. Cost control mechanisms as part of the service selection are therefore essential for the service broker. This paper proposes a cost control mechanism based on instantaneous service price prediction.