Total Cost of Service Life: The Need for Decision Support in Selecting, Comparing and Orchestrating Services

Conventional services as well as web services are explored and discovered by descriptions of their properties. Such properties are either functional or non-functional. Amongst the non-functional properties is the price for service consumption. Evaluating the price of a service is difficult due to a huge variety of existing pricing models and conditions. But still, it is important to a service consumer to evaluate arising costs, esp. in scenarios of long-term usage and if combining several services. In theory and practice so far there exists no method that sufficiently guides the decision of selecting specific services regarding the non-functional property price. This paper strives to promote research-in-progress for such a method, which is based on the TCO concept and on insights from capital budgeting in investment theory. The method is indented to support service consumers in selecting a specific service, in comparing several functionally similar services, and finally in evaluating complete service orchestrations.

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