A Survey of Cost Accounting in Service-Oriented Computing

Abstract

Nowadays, companies are increasingly offering their business services through computational services on the Internet in order to attract more customers and increase their revenues. However, these services have financial costs that need to be managed in order to maximize profit. Several models and techniques have been recently reported that aim at managing, controlling and reducing service costs. However, each of these contributions covers a specific cost aspect subject to certain constraints, while in practice more comprehensive solutions are necessary. This paper presents a survey of models and techniques to handle service costs throughout the phases of the service lifecycle. Based on this survey, we identified a number of opportunities for future research, which should eventually yield comprehensive cost solutions.

Cost Management of Service Compositions

“…Cost management in service composition has some open challenges as identified in (Albuquerque de Medeiros, Rosa, Campos, & Ferreira Pires, 2014a), mainly when complex cost behaviours are taken into account to predict, simulate, control and report cost of service compositions. Cost behaviours can be classified as fixed, variable, mixed and step cost (Hansen, Hansen, Mowen, Mowen, & Madison, 2010;T Horngren, Datar, & Rajan, 2011).…”

“…Cost management has been extensively discussed in service-oriented computing (Albuquerque de Medeiros, Rosa, Campos, & Ferreira Pires, 2014a) and generally in industry (Siguenza Guzman, Van den Abbeele, Vandewalle, Verhaaren, & Cattrysse, 2013). Outside service-oriented computing, the resources used to provide services or products are usually internal resources controlled by the provider.…”

“…In contrast, in SOC most of the resources (services) are provided by third-parties and, in the worst case, each service can have a different cost behaviour. Although cost management in different phases of the service composition life-cycle has been extensively discussed before (Albuquerque de Medeiros, Rosa, Campos, & Ferreira Pires, 2014a), to the best our knowledge different classes of cost behaviours have not been properly addressed yet in the literature.…”

Predicting Service Composition Costs with Complex Cost Behavior

“…Therefore, the planning of service compositions should consider all cost behaviors (i.e., variable, fixed, mixed and step cost) and identify situations that affect the profitability of the composition. To address this issue, some approaches have been proposed to compute cost of business processes and service compositions [5]. However, these approaches do not take into account all classes of cost behaviors that a service can have.…”