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Abstract-This paper addresses two known issues for dynamically composed services in digital ecosystems. The first issue is that of efficient distributed transaction management. The conventional view of transactions is unsuitable as the local autonomy of the participants is vital for the involvement of SMEs. The second issue is that of charging for such distributed transactions, where there will often be dynamically created services whose composition is not known in advance and might involve parts of different transactions. The paper provides solutions for both of these issues, which can be combined to provide for a unified approach to transaction management and accounting of dynamically composed services in digital ecosystems.

Abstract-We present a framework enabling charging for composed services comprised of services offered by multiple providers. In the framework rating engines may generate charge information for individual services and provide this information upon request to other rating engines when these services are used as part of a composed service. Rating engines additionally employ a two-phase rating process which allows potentially complex business agreements between providers to be reflected in composed service charges. Charges can vary depending on the context in which a service is executed, for example, as part of a composed service which includes services offered by a partner provider. Crucially, the process allows rating engines to calculate these varying charges without having to be manually pre-configured with details of the structure of individual composed services. In the paper we provide an overview of the framework, specifying in detail the rating process and inter-rating engine communications, and describe via an example its deployment in a distributed environment supporting the execution of composed services.

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