Applying variability modeling concepts to support decision making for service composition

Service oriented architectures consist of loosely coupled services that can be quickly composed to support flexibility in business processes. The flexibility requires alternative service compositions to fulfill a customer’s business process. However, customers are often not aware of their options and thus cannot make good decisions on how to compose their services. Therefore, we propose to support the decision making of the customer by modeling the different alternatives explicitly in a variability model and communicating the alternatives to the customer.