Service pricing

Abstract

The on-line discovery, trading and consumption of services as envisioned in the Internet of Services demand an advanced support of the business aspects. Pricing plays a fundamental role among such business facets on both sides of a service marketplace. This chapter discusses the scientific background of the USDL Pricing Module as a comprehensive, applicable, executable, and non-proprietary endeavor. As such, the chapter elicits what makes modeling and engineering the price of a service transaction less straightforward than in the case of a product sale. In addition, we review the state of the art with regard to price meta-models and give a detailed explanation of the most differentiating design choices in the meta-model we propose, including the interdependencies with other USDL modules.