Modelling quality of service in service oriented computing

The ability to gauge quality of service is critical if we are to realise the potential of the service-oriented computing paradigm. Many techniques have been proposed for calculating the quality of a service, and they do so typically by collecting quality ratings from the users of the service, then combining them in one way or another to derive the quality of the service. We argue that combining quality ratings in such a way may lead to inaccurate quality measures for services. This is because different users often have different expectations on the quality of a service and their ratings tend to be closely related to these expectations, i.e. how their expectations are met. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy based quality of service assessment model based on user expectations. That is, we collect expectations as well as ratings from the users of a service, then calculate the quality of the service based on the ratings that have similar expectations. We give examples to show that our approach can result in a more accurate and meaningful measure for quality of service