Abstract
Usage-based pricing or Pay-as-You-Go is a relatively new SaaS business model that may provide customers the option to pay for only what they use. Yet, it is more challenging to implement than traditional Pay-before-Use subscriptions considering that it need not only realize financial payment on consumption-based behaviors, but also regulate the rights and obligations among the providers, consumers, and platforms in a legal form. To address these challenges, in this article Smart Legal Contract (SLC) is integrated into a service computing platform by introducing a new architecture, called Service as a Smart Contract (SaaSC). On the aspect of service legalization, through combining SaaS and SaaSC, we establish three kinds of terms in SLC-based software subscription contract to support service's registration, discovery and customization, so that a complete transaction procedure can be regulated in terms of service states, transaction process, and interactions among contracting parties. On the aspect of service financialization, we propose a new scheme of service interface declaration in the SLC-based SPESC contract. By automatically executing smart contracts and checking the terms, the pay-as-you-go billing form can be made fine-grained payment after using service interface calls. Moreover, we take weather forecast service as a case to implement and analyze the acquisition, delivery, and contractual payment of software service on Blockchain smart contract. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed SaaS+SaaSC architecture so that it provides a practicable approach for contractual software service.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 3665-3681 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Services Computing |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 1 2023 |
Keywords
- Blockchain smart contract
- SaaS
- microservices
- service discovery
- service registration
- smart legal contract
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Information Systems and Management
- Hardware and Architecture
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Computer Science Applications