The research project Service Optimization and Quality (SEQUAL) that starts in October, came first in the IOP Generic Communication funding programme of Senternovem.
Rob van der Mei and his research group Probability and Stochastic Networks receive 300 thousand euro for research aimed to improve the quality of web services. For this project, Centrum voor Wiskunde & Informatica cooperates with TNO, de University of Twente, IBM Netherlands, Ericsson Netherlands, Ordina and Mobilaria.
The IOP Generic Communication programme aims at tightening the cooperation between commercial and academic partners. CWI also stimulates this kind of cooperation. Moreover, the research subject fits into the strategic theme societal logistics, one of CWI's cornerstones for the coming years.
Efficiently combining services
The new project deals with composite services, which combine services of third parties. For example a website where visitors can book a flight and a hotel at once. The company behind this website relies on a company that provides flight information of multiple airlines and on a hotel booking office. These subcontractors in their turn rely on the airlines and hotels respectively. The quality of the composite service, the website, is very hard to maintain.
The partners of a composite service usually agree upon a certain amount of quality, a so-called Service Level Agreement. This states for instance how often the services contact each other, how fast they handle each others requests and what they pay for it. The researchers want to create a model they can use to value these variables. They want the model to be used by composite services to determine which combination of contracts will lead to the highest quality, and is as cheap as possible.
