Use Case: Service Aggregator
The use case for Service Aggregator intends to focus on electronic services for consumers, offered by service providers and service aggregator in particular, since it is expected that this industry will be heavily impacted by the advance of the electronic service economy. The use case entails the design and development of a (SLA@SOI) framework, allowing managing a complex Service Portfolio. The framework components will integrate, manage, monitor and predict the uptake of electronic services in a multi-domain environment, including in-house and out-house services.
The main focus is on the service aggregator’s perspective and how it could improve the quality perceived by customers and their global satisfaction and they can achieve a whole governance from the business point of view. It covers electronic services, including the whole lifecycle starting from the commercial service definition, down to provisioning and the post-sale issues such as SLA management/enforcement and tracking, arbitration and penalty management; in this respect, it will provide requirements to some of the WP of Action Line A (e.g.: business mgmt, service mgmt, SLA mgmt,…) and allow to verify major outcomes from those WPs.
It is expected that automated SLA management will help the world’s network operators, service providers and content aggregators to increase revenues, enhance customer loyalty and capitalise on opportunities offered by convergence.
A new research line to increase quality perception and getting a more adjusted offer to customers will be provided by means of analysing, predicting and influencing the dependencies between service levels and user behaviour patterns in multi-domain service deployments. The use case relies on the insight into service portfolio, demographic and socio-economic factors, contextual factors, resource-availability, usage patterns, price sensitivity and channel access; similarly, SLA enforcement (overall of non functional elements) and adjustment capabilities are considered to be important in order to guarantee best user perception preserving underlining resources. Next to this, the use case provides capabilities to predict future impacts on service levels of the physical service network and infrastructure resulting from modelled or anticipated changes in user behaviour using analysis of historical usage patterns as input.
Specific objectives for this work package are:
- Provide valuable insights and specific requirements for Service Level Agreement models and frameworks from the perspective of large public service deployments
- Support dynamic e-contracting capabilities including business and technological aspects.
- Develop a supporting Infrastructure Utilisation and Planning models to be able to predict the impact of various Services, their likely uptake level on the Service Infrastructure.
- Apply autonomic policies in order to support SLA self-management.
- Integrate a framework (testbed) allowing to manage a complex Service Portfolio in a holistic way, including both internal services and services provided by third parties (monitoring to service level must be reached even though access to infrastructure isn’t possible).
The following output of this work package is now publicly available:
