Accounting, Charging and Billing for Dynamic Service Composition Chains

Services delivered to an end user can be composed of numerous subservices and form chains of composed services. These service composition chains traditionally consist of a static set of business entities. However, in order to increase business agility, dynamic service composition chains can be used by leveraging techniques of service publishing and discovery, and consist of more short-lived relations between the various business entities. This chapter focuses on issues concerning accounting, charging and billing of such dynamic service composition chains. In this type of service delivery, several traditional settlement models are not applicable since existing architectures lack support of automated negotiation of settlement parameters. Examples of such parameters are what the service consumer will be charged for and how much, how and when the consumer will be billed. In this chapter, the requirements that have to be fulfilled with respect to accounting, charging and billing in dynamic service composition chains are explored. Based on these requirements, a framework architecture for accounting charging and billing is described.