A message negotiation approach to e-services by utility function and multi-criteria decision analysis

In modern society, information and internet techniques have changed human lifestyles. Service providers provide innovative e-services to attract and retain their customers. The popularity of e-services has made selecting a good e-service, which will also provide reasonable composite e-service solutions, an important issue. Therefore, this work proposes a message negotiation approach to e-services to assist consumers in acquiring a reasonable composite e-service solution. An e-service composition involves a complete e-service process including a series of steps. E-service formalization, an e-service utility model and a multi-criteria decision analysis are used to determine the optimal selection order of e-services for each specific e-service composition step. Then, the selected e-service for each step is composed through a message negotiation process. The result is presented to the consumer as a reasonable composite e-service solution. This work uses an ingredient procurement use case of property management in Taiwan to demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective.