Design of competitive web services using QFD for satisfaction of QoS requirements

It is the key concern for service providers that how a web service stands out among functionally similar services. QoS is a distinct and decisive factor in service selection among functionally similar services. Therefore, how to design services to meet customers' QoS requirements is an urgent problem for service providers. This paper proposes an approach using QFD (Quality Function Deployment) which is a quality methodology to transfer services' QoS requirements into services' design attribute characteristics. Fuzzy set is utilized to deal with subjective and vague assessments such as importance of QoS properties. TCI (Technical Competitive Index) is defined to compare the technical competitive capacity of a web service with those of other functionally similar services in the aspect of QoS. Optimization solutions of target values of service design attributes is determined by GA (Genetic Algorithm) in order to make the technical performance of the improved service higher than those of any other rival service products with the lowest improvement efforts. Finally, we evaluate candidate improvement solutions on cost-effectiveness. As the output of QFD process, the optimization targets and order of priority of service design attributes can be used as an important basis for developing and improving service products.