A Formal Approach to Investigate the Performance of Modern E-commerce Services

Modern E-commerce services are offered in a complex but flexible setup involving multiple websites (e.g., business web portals or price comparison websites) with facilities for determining the quality of products. Though this modern style of service provisioning attracts more customers it also significantly increases load on the web servers that are implementing the E-commerce services. The concern is that overloaded servers will become unresponsive and will drop requests which are beyond their capacity. This paper proposes a formal approach in order to investigate the effects of traffic load and the number of dropped requests on the performance of modern E-commerce services. The proposed approach is based on a class-based priority scheme that classifies E-commerce requests into different classes by taking into account the type of request and the client's behaviour. The proposed model is formally specified, implemented and tested through several experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the response time and throughout of high priority requests, and also analyses the consequential effect on dropped (low priority) requests.