A Survey of Cost Accounting in Service-Oriented Computing

Nowadays, companies are increasingly offering their business services through computational services on the Internet in order to attract more customers and increase their revenues. However, these services have financial costs that need to be managed in order to maximize profit. Several models and techniques have been recently reported that aim at managing, controlling and reducing service costs. However, each of these contributions covers a specific cost aspect subject to certain constraints, while in practice more comprehensive solutions are necessary. This paper presents a survey of models and techniques to handle service costs throughout the phases of the service lifecycle. Based on this survey, we identified a number of opportunities for future research, which should eventually yield comprehensive cost solutions.