A Method for Service Quality Assessment in a Service Ecosystem

The increasing proliferation of independent application service providers is making traditional IT infrastructure insufficient when dealing with new issues that appear in a dynamic outsourcing business model. Quality of service (QoS) gradually becomes an essential benchmark to differentiate diverse service providers during service selection process. In this paper, we argue service selection can be deemed as a decision making process -to decide which services providers should be selected within the specified service provision context during a definitive timeslot. Thus, existing decision support approaches can be leveraged if applicable. Hence, we propose a service selection solution which utilizes the decision support systems module (DSS Module) to select the most appropriate service. In DSS module we introduce AHP model to carry out the service QoS measurement based on the Context-specific Quality Aspects. The contributions of this paper are two folds. Firstly, we provide a novel and feasible solution for QoS-based service selection and secondly, we apply DSS module into web services, thus opening a new, fertile ground for DSS research in service ecosystem literature.