Uncertainty and uncertainty tolerance in service provisioning

Abstract

Service, in general term is a type of economic activity where the consumers utilize labour and/or expertise of others to perform a specific task. The birth and continued growth of the Internet provide a new medium for services to be delivered, and enable services to become widely and readily available. In recent years, the Internet has become an important platform to provide services to the end users. Service provisioning, In the context of computing, is the process of providing users with access to data and technology resources. In a perfect operating environment, the entities involved can expect the system will perform as intended or up to an accepted level of quality. Unfortunately, disruptions or failures can occur which can affect the operation of the service. Thus, the entities involved, in particular the service requester faces a situation whereby the service requester’s belief towards certain process in the service provisioning life cycle is affected, i.e. deviates from the actual truth. This situation whereby the service requester’s belief is affected is referred as an uncertainty. in this thesis, we discuss and explore the issue of uncertainty throughout the service provisioning life cycle and provide a measure to tolerate uncertainty in service provisioning offer through the application of subjective probability framework. This thesis provides several key contributions to address the uncertainty issues in service provision- Ing system in particular, for a service requester to overcome the negative consequence of uncertainty. The key contributions are: (1) introduction to the issue of uncertainty in service provisioning system, (2) a new classification scheme for uncertainties in service provisioning system, (3) a unified view of uncertainty in service provisioning system based on temporal classification, which is linked to service requester’s view, (4) a concept of uncertainty tolerance for service provisioning, (5) an approach and framework for automated uncertainty tolerance in service provisioning offer. The approach and framework for uncertainty tolerance in service provisioning offer presented in this thesis is evaluated through an empirical study. The result from the study shows the viability of the approach and framework of the uncertainty tolerance Mechanism through the application of subjective probability theory. The result also shows the positive outcome of the mechanism in term of higher cumulative utility, and better acceptance rate for the service requester.