Service composition provides a promising solution to integrate service components and business process, enabling cooperation with new partners. It increasingly relies on multiple service providers to fulfill a given complex business goal. Despite significant progress, most approaches of service composition are still impractical and almost unusable, because the current methods of service composi...

Among enterprise application integration solutions, Web services technologies are promising technologies to achieve the interoperability in heterogeneous environments. However, traditional Web service invocation may lead to unnecessary network traffic, long response time, and bottleneck problems at service providers. While a publish/subscribe model provides an advantage of prompt notification w...

Trust and reputation mechanisms are often used in peer-to-peer networks, multi-agent systems and online communities for trust-based interactions among the users. Trust values are used to differentiate among members of the community as well as to recommend a service provider. Although different users have different needs and expectations in different aspects of the service providers, traditional...

Trust is as significant a factor for successful online interactions as it is in offline communities. Trust is an important factor that is used as a criterion for service selection. There is a need to know information about services and service providers to establish trust and identify their trustworthiness. Most trust studies focus on trust establishment for services without clearly identifying...

Dynamic discovery based on semantic description of services is an essential aspect of the Semantic Web services integration process. Since not all data required for service discovery can always be included in service descriptions, some data needs to be obtained during run-time. In this paper we define a model for service interface allowing required data to be fetched from the service provider d...

BGP/MPLS VPN is a mechanism defined in IETF RFC 2547 that allows service providers to use their IP backbone to provide VPN services. This mechanism is based on using BGP to distribute VPN routing information to the routers in the backbone network and using MPLS to forward VPN traffic. MPLS tunnels are created dynamically when needed, which relieves service providers of pre-provisioning tens of ...

We consider a three-tiered cloud service market and propose an energy efficient pricing strategy in this market. Here, the end customers are served by the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, who implement customized services for their customers. To host these services, these SaaS providers, in turn, lease the infrastructure related resources from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Pl...

In recent years, there have been a growing number of online social platforms which allow users to publish and share their personal stories, opinions, knowledge, expertise, and product reviews. Online service switching has become a major challenge for marketers. In this study, we attempt to understand online service switching behavior through investigating blog service switching. We use the push...

Decentralized service providers specialize on contributing their core competency to an overall goal. This paper focuses on the strategic behavior of service providers within Service Value Networks. We present an abstract model as a formalization of a service value network. The model comprehends an auction-based mechanism design to allocate multiattribute service offers within the network and to...

Economic theory defines services as customisable, interactive processes that providers have the potential to carry out together with clients that benefit from their effects. It is understood that service transactions are best organised by means of virtual collaborative networks, where ICT allows configuring multiple providers and processes on a per-request basis. Existing conceptual models for ...