Title: E-contracting with price configuration for Web services and QoS

Authors: Felipe Goncalves Marchione, Marcelo Fantinato, Maria Beatriz Felgar De Toledo, Itana Maria De Souza Gimenes

Addresses: School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of Sao Paulo, Rua Arlindo Bettio, 1000 – 03828-000, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil. ' School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of Sao Paulo, Rua Arlindo Bettio, 1000 – 03828-000, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil. ' Institute of Computing, State University of Campinas, Av. Albert Einstein, 1251 – 13083-970, Campinas, SP, Brazil. ' Informatics Department, State University of Maringa, Av. Colombo, 5.790 – 87020-900, Maringa, PR, Brazil

Abstract: The large amount of information in electronic contracts hampers their establishment due to high complexity. An approach inspired in Software Product Line (PL) and based on feature modelling was proposed to make this process more systematic through information reuse and structuring. By assessing the feature-based approach in relation to a proposed set of requirements, it was showed that the approach does not allow the price of services and of Quality of Services (QoS) attributes to be considered in the negotiation and included in the electronic contract. Thus, this paper also presents an extension of such approach in which prices and price types associated to Web services and QoS levels are applied. An extended toolkit prototype is also presented as well as an experiment example of the proposed approach.

Keywords: price configuration; e-contracting; web services; electronic services; e-services; business process; information reuse; feature modelling; software product lines; QoS; quality of service; electronic contracts; e-contracts; feature modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2010.036403

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2010 Vol.6 No.4, pp.357 - 384

Published online: 02 Nov 2010 *

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