A framework for automated creation and deployment of consolidated charging schemes for service compositions

If environments offering facilities for service composition are to be commercially successful then it will be important that service providers can avail of efficient, automated processes by which composed services can be metered, charged and billed for. In many industries, for example telecommunications, sophisticated systems are employed to provide usage and content based charging for services. In these systems charging schemes are typically manually configured and verified prior to services being made available to customers. For composed services we require a more dynamic charging approach, in which charging schemes for composed services can be automatically generated and deployed. In this paper we describe a framework that meets this need. In it, charging schemes for services making up a composed services are collected, consolidated and deployed onto multiple rating engines, which then coordinate to calculate a charge for an composed service invocation.