MODELING QUALITY OF SERVICES IN SERVICE-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENTS

Information technology is the core enabler for global businesses. Based on an integration of services provided by companies, virtual enterprises are built to achieve common business goals. This integration can be supported or even automated, if companies publish a standardized, sufficient description of the services they offer in a formal, computer-readable way. This paper argues that the service orientation paradigm offers a promising approach to achieve this goal, but some major aspects are currently not concerned sufficiently. Therefore, this paper introduces a model for enriched service description that goes beyond technical interface specifications as known from Web services by including Quality of Services properties. The Quality of Services model will be integrated in the general service model. We illustrate the usability of the model by sketching scenarios with examples like automated discovery, substitution and optimized composition of services to support service oriented processes.