Business-oriented resource management policies for e-commerce servers

Quality of service of e-commerce sites has been usually managed by the allocation of resources such as processors, disks, and network bandwidth, and by tracking conventional performance metrics such as response time, throughput, and availability. However, the metrics that are of utmost importance to the management and shareholders of a Web store are revenue and profit. Thus, resource management schemes for e-commerce servers should be geared towards optimizing business metrics as opposed to conventional performance metrics. This paper uses a state transition graph called customer behavior model graph (CBMG) to describe a customer session. It then presents a family of priority based resource management policies for e-commerce servers. Priorities change dynamically as a function of the state a customer is in and as a function of the amount of money the customer has accumulated in his/her shopping cart. A detailed simulation model was developed to assess the gain of these dynamic policies with respect to policies that are oblivious to economic considerations. Simulation results show that the multilevel dynamic priority scheme suggested here can significantly improve the values of business-oriented metrics, such as revenue per second, during peak periods. E-commerce sites that use this approach will be able to improve revenue at peak times with the same server capacity. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.