Ontology-Based Analysis Of eService Bundles For Networked Enterprises

Model-based approaches to developing multi-enterprise e-Business initiatives help involved enterprises understand the initiatives by creating a shared understanding as a basis for profitability assessment. Still, when developing a business model where multiple potential enterprises may participate in offering a service bundle, complexity increases, and the need arises for automated support for the selection of services to include in the service bundle, implying also a selection of partners to work with. To put it differently, given a set of potential services to include in a business model, we need tools to configure one or more feasible service bundles, and to reason about the pros and cons of service bundles. Then the business analysis can be completed by calculating profitability of these service bundles. The configuration process takes into consideration inherent dependencies between available services. Its output is a set of suggested service bundles, based on these dependencies as well as possibly other given requirements related to service properties as price, quality and more. In this paper we present a methodology for doing all the above. We discuss and exemplify theoretical fundaments for such a methodology, in the framework of an e-Business analysis.