Interactive selection of Web services under multiple objectives

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Neubauer;Christian Stummer

  • Affiliations:

  • Secure Business Austria, Vienna, Austria;Department of Business Administration, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • Information Technology and Management
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The manual composition of efficient combinations of Web services becomes almost impossible as the number of services increases dramatically. When determining an appropriate set of services, managers must take into consideration given business processes, business strategy and multiple Quality of Service (QoS) objectives while ensuring the cost-efficient usage of limited resources. Because the agility with which new business requirements are adapted has a major influence on business success and poor investment decisions may thus entail corporate failure, decision makers are experiencing growing pressure to prove the value of IT investments--but they often lack appropriate multicriteria decision support tools. This paper introduces a new decision support approach that more properly addresses these challenges. We implemented this approach into a tool and evaluated the performance of two popular methods (i.e., the Analytic Hierarchy Process and the Weighted Scoring Method) by means of a real-life case study in the social security sector. It turns out that the decision support system assists decision makers in identifying investments that more precisely target their company's business needs by allowing them to interactively determine and continually optimize service allocation according to the corporate business processes and multiple (strategic) objectives.