A Generic Charging Policy Based Accounting for Web Services

Problem statement: Metering and charging are basic accounting functions that are essential for commercial usage of web services. Current charging and accounting schemes primarily involve users being charged flat or based on the connection/session time. Accounting management of web services should provide for metering, charging, accounting, billing, payment and auditing. We have extended our earlier work, a Policy based Accounting for Web Services (WS-PACT), to develop a generic and comprehensive charging policy that can cater to different charging patterns. WS-PACT provides a flexible model to meet the varying billing and payment needs of service providers. Approach: Policies are expressed in WS-Policy and policy query facility has been developed using XQuery. Results: Users can use the query facility to obtain the charges being levied and can decide on which services to use by taking into account their preferred spending limits and payment patterns. Conclusion: We have implemented and tested the charging policy and query facility with a sample application.