Matching Complex Consumer Needs with e-Service Bundles

e-Services are commercial services that can be ordered and provisioned via the Internet, satisfying a consumer need. Sometimes, such services are provisioned by a constellation of enterprises, and consist of multiple elementary services. A problem is then how to configure such a constellation, satisfying a complex consumer need. To this end, we extend the notion of consumer need in the e3value methodology, as originally intended for designing value constellations. We also show how needs can be (automatically) matched with services provisioned by suppliers. As such, our contribution can be seen as a first step towards on-demand dynamic value constellations, provisioning e-services

Value-Based Business-IT Alignment in Networked Constellations of Enterprises

Business-ICT alignment is the problem of matching ICTservices with the requirements of the business. In businesses of any significant size, business-ICT alignment is a hard problem, which is currently not solved completely. With the advent of networked constellations of enterprises, the problem gets a new dimension, because in such a network, there is not a single point of authority for making decisions about ICT support to solve conflicts in requirements these various enterprises may have. Network constellations exist when different businesses decide to cooperate by means of ICT networks, but they also exist in large corporations, which often consist of nearly independent business units, and thus have no single point of authority anymore. In this position paper we discuss the need for several solution techniques to address the problem of business-ICT alignment in networked constellations. Such techniques include: -RE techniques to describe networked value constellations requesting and offering ICT services as economic value. These techniques should allow reasoning about the matching of business needs with available ICT services in the constellation. - RE techniques to design a networked ICT architecture that supports ICT services required by the business, taking the value offered by those services, and the costs incurred by the architecture, into account. - Models of decision processes about ICT services and their architecture, and maturity models of those processes.The techniques and methods will be developed and validated using case studies and action research

Triple play as a separate market? Empirical findings and consequences to broadband market definition

Double and triple play bundled offers are common phenomena in many national communication markets. However the overall market context, technological background of provision, the level of facility based platform competition and strategic role of the bundled offers seems to be different in national markets. There is clear challenge to the current European regulatory approach to broadband markets, which is treated as a separate market on its own. If there was a separate market for the bundled product, the whole market analysis and remedy system had to be adapted to this market reality. Testing the (triple play) bundle the market hypothesis is the logical and necessary first step to address this issue. We designed and conducted an empirical study supported by the Hungarian Competition Authority in order to address these questions. A special, situation adaptive questionnaire design was applied in order to get the possibly best informed and adequate stated preference reactions to a 10% price change. We used the cri ical loss test for market definition, testing whether there is a separate market for triple play bundles. Results indicates that the market definition question whether bundle has to or could be considered as a separate relevant market can be answered using well designed survey techniques. Many clues support the hypothesis that the triple play bundle in 2010 indeed was a separate relevant market. --triple play,double play,multi-play,bundle,market definition,SSNIP test,consumer survey,stated preference approach,critical loss

Mass Customization in Wireless Communication Services: Individual Service Bundles and Tariffs

This paper presents results on mass customization of wireless communications services and tariffs. It advocates for a user-centric view of wireless service configuration and pricing as opposed to present-day service catalog options. The focus is on design methodology and tools for such individual services and tariffs, using altogether information compression, negotiation algorithms, and risk portfolio analysis. We first analyze the user and supplier needs and aspirations. We then introduce the systematic design-oriented approach which can be applied. The implications of this approach for users and suppliers are discussed based on an end-user survey and on model-based calculations. It is shown that users can achieve desired service bundle cost reduction, while suppliers can improve significantly their risk-profit equilibrium points, reduce churn and simplify provisioning.negotiation;mass customization;service configuration;mobile communication services;individual tariffs

NLSC: Unrestricted Natural Language-based Service Composition through Sentence Embeddings

Current approaches for service composition (assemblies of atomic services) require developers to use: (a) domain-specific semantics to formalize services that restrict the vocabulary for their descriptions, and (b) translation mechanisms for service retrieval to convert unstructured user requests to strongly-typed semantic representations. In our work, we argue that effort to developing service descriptions, request translations, and matching mechanisms could be reduced using unrestricted natural language; allowing both: (1) end-users to intuitively express their needs using natural language, and (2) service developers to develop services without relying on syntactic/semantic description languages. Although there are some natural language-based service composition approaches, they restrict service retrieval to syntactic/semantic matching. With recent developments in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, we motivate the use of Sentence Embeddings by leveraging richer semantic representations of sentences for service description, matching and retrieval. Experimental results show that service composition development effort may be reduced by more than 44\% while keeping a high precision/recall when matching high-level user requests with low-level service method invocations.Comment: This paper will appear on SCC'19 (IEEE International Conference on Services Computing) on July 1

Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

Trading of cloud of things resources

Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) continue to emerge as revolutionary paradigms to support wide range of real world scenarios. They promise benefits for increasing number of applications, including health, smart cities, smart homes, smart logistics, video surveillance, energy and environmental monitoring. Independent deployments of each technology have issues that can be resolved partially or fully by integrating Cloud and IoT. This integration forms a new paradigm that is called Cloud of Things (CoT)supporting Everything as a Service (XaaS) service model. Despite the issues integration resolves, the integrated services will suffer from issues that Cloud and IoT offerings previously encountered. This includes interoperability, ambiguous SLAs, QoS, elasticity and reliability concerns. This paper argues that commoditising CoT resources will help resolving these issues. This paper aims to; 1) review the state-of-the-art in CoT literature 2) propose a conceptual model for CoT marketplace and its basic trading processes

A theoretical and computational basis for CATNETS

The main content of this report is the identification and definition of market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. These build the theoretical foundation for the work within the following two years of the CATNETS project. --Grid Computing

Coordination of Purchasing and Bidding Activities Across Markets

In both consumer purchasing and industrial procurement, combinatorial interdependencies among the items to be purchased are commonplace. E-commerce compounds the problem by providing more opportunities for switching suppliers at low costs, but also potentially eases the problem by enabling automated market decision-making systems, commonly referred to as trading agents, to make purchasing decisions in an integrated manner across markets. Most of the existing research related to trading agents assumes that there exists a combinatorial market mechanism in which buyers (or sellers) can bid (or sell) service or merchant bundles. Todayâ??s prevailing e-commerce practice, however, does not support this assumption in general and thus limits the practical applicability of these approaches. We are investigating a new approach to deal with the combinatorial interdependency challenges for online markets. This approach relies on existing commercial online market institutions such as posted-price markets and various online auctions that sell single items. It uses trading agents to coordinate a buyerâ??s purchasing and bidding activities across multiple online markets simultaneously to achieve the best overall procurement effectiveness. This paper presents two sets of models related to this approach. The first set of models formalizes optimal purchasing decisions across posted-price markets with fixed transaction costs. Flat shipping costs, a common e-tailing practice, are captured in these models. We observe that making optimal purchasing decisions in this context is NP-hard in the strong sense and suggest several efficient computational methods based on discrete location theory. The second set of models is concerned with the coordination of bidding activities across multiple online auctions. We study the underlying coordination problem for a collection of first or second-price sealed-bid auctions and derive the optimal coordination and bidding policies.

Theoretical and Computational Basis for Economical Ressource Allocation in Application Layer Networks - Annual Report Year 1

This paper identifies and defines suitable market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. --Grid Computing