Abstract:

The turbulent modern business environments require firms to have a more flexible and agile IT architecture to respond to dynamic external changes. The advent of e-business in particular emphasizes the role of networking to link business partners and integrate business processes with the new IT architecture. Web Services, defined as software constructs that deliver business functionalities over the Internet, are considered to be a new technology that provides not only new IT architecture and strategies for firms, but also a technological basis for business processes management.

This dissertation develops a framework and methodology to support business processes using Web services. The framework consists of four main phases: business process modeling, identification of Web services opportunities, service selection and evaluation, and service composition. This dissertation focuses on the service selection and evaluation phase to support business processes. It explores criteria to select Web services for supporting business processes and develops a formal model to choose appropriate Web services for a given business process. Vendor reputation and vendor cost as vendor attributes, and service price and quality factors including reliability, performance, and security as Web service attributes are incorporated in the model. Multiple solution methods including exhaustive search, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing are employed to address the problem. To demonstrate the viability of the model and the solution methods, a direct-to-customer drop ship retail model is employed. The solution methods are applied to the case to assemble an appropriate set of Web services. The results are compared to assess their effectiveness under various conditions.