Exploring Cloud Service Brokering from an Interface Perspective
Yucong Duan
∗
, Nanjangud C. Narendra
†
, Wencai Du
∗
, Yongzhi Wang
‡
, Nianjun Zhou
§
∗
Hainan University, China
†
IBM India Software Lab, Bangalore, India
‡
Florida International University, USA
§
IBM Watson Research Center, USA
Email: duanyucong@hotmail.com, ncnaren@gmail.com, wencai@hainu.edu.cn, ywang032@cis.fiu.edu, jzhou@us.ibm.com
Abstr act —Service brokering has an increasingly
prominent role in bridging the gap b etween business
requirement and technology enablement. We propose
the concept of service value brokering (SVB) to
fulfil the possible missing linkages between business
and technology layer. In this paper, we modeled a
SVB Web service as an integration of two layers
with the business interface (BIF) and the technical
interface (TIF). With this distinction, Web service
compositions can map to two layers of compositions
at both BIF and TIF levels. We notice that any partial
consideration on the consistency of either BIF or
TIF layers would likely leave mismatching situations
on the other layer. We employ SVB to solve these
mismatching situations. With the help of SVB, we
address the needs of coherent business planning and
IT implementation in a model driven manner. Finally,
we illustrate the feasibility of our approach in the
development of a modern cloud-based tourism e-
commerce platform.
Keywords-Cloud, brokering, mismatching, mo del
driven, tourism
I. Introduction
The idea of broker can be traced back to the beginning
of economic activities of human beings. Typically, a
broker is an individual or firm that charges a fee or
commission for executing services among the service
providers and consumers initiated from either side. It
acts as an agent for a customer or provider and charges
the customer a commission for its services. Its duties
typically include: determining service values, advertising
properties for service, showing properties to prospective
service consumers, and advising consumers with regard
to offers and related other services.
Similar challenges exist in E-commerce; a natural
extension is to create an E-commerce platform to ad-
dress coherence and harmony between business objec-
tives and technology enablement. It has been shown
that E-brokers provide support to enhance interaction
among services and stakeholders. In E-Commerce, the
communications among different parties are completed
through Web service calls. In the previous research of E-
commerce, Bichler et al.[1] used e-brokers to enhance the
interoperability of E-commerce at the application level.
Loreto et al.[10] used brokers to integrate telephone busi-
ness and IT world in the manner of an intermediate layer.
Rosenberg and Dustdar[12] used e-brokers to bridge the
difference of heterogeneous business rules. Brokers have
been used to fill the gap of QoS expectations. Yu and
Lin[15] utilized service brokers to meet SLAs of services
and construct trust network for bridging reputation
information[9]. Brokers can be used for enhancing re-
source usage. Srikumar et al [13] used a broker to enable
grid resource searching and distribution where a broker
functions mostly as an autonomous agent[11]. D’Mello et
al.[5] used a broker to select qualified services in terms of
QoS. Budgen et al.[2] introduced an information broker
to integrate health knowledge and data with enhanced
privacy protection.
Existing broker researches have used brokers to dis-
cover, match, negotiate, select and compose services
from either a technological or a business perspective. But
there are very few which cover both perspectives at the
same time. Enlightened by the ideology of value driven
engineering[4], we have proposed the concept of Service
Value Broker ( SVB) [7]
1
to fulfill the missing link which
we have depicted as various mismatching situations.
SVB as modeling and implementation element helps to
integrate the analysis of economic and technical aspects
for a business implementation on top of Web services.
SVB relates services not limited to technological level
as most SLAs based approaches[15] have done but also
up to the business level[1], [12]. The integration also
helps to fill the gap of global[3] scheduling and local
planning in an explicit and direct manner. Although
contract negotiation[16] provides the flexibility of service
transaction, it does not provide assistance on guiding
the global schedule which SVB supports since the con-
1
This paper was supported in part by NSFC grant 61162010 and
61363007 and by HNU grant KYQD1242 and HDSF201310
2014 IEEE International Conference on Web Services
978-1-4799-5054-6/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICWS.2014.55
329
2014 IEEE International Conference on Web Services
978-1-4799-5054-6/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICWS.2014.55
329