Business-oriented resource management policies for e-commerce servers

Quality of service of e-commerce sites has been usually managed by the allo cation of resources such as processors, disks, and network bandwidth, and b y tracking conventional performance metrics such as response time, throughp ut, and availability. However, the metrics that are of utmost importance to the management and shareholders of a Web store are revenue and profit. Thu s, resource management schemes for e-commerce servers should be geared towa rds optimizing business metrics as opposed to conventional performance metr ics. This paper uses a state transition graph called customer behavior mode l graph (CBMG) to describe a customer session. It then presents a family of priority based resource management policies for e-commerce servers. Priori ties change dynamically as a function of the state a customer is in and as a function of the amount of money the customer has accumulated in his/her s hopping cart. A detailed simulation model was developed to assess the gain of these dynamic policies with respect to policies that are oblivious to ec onomic considerations. Simulation results show that the multilevel dynamic priority scheme suggested here can significantly improve the values of busi ness-oriented metrics, such as revenue per second, during peak periods. E-c ommerce sites that use this approach will be able to improve revenue at pea k times with the same server capacity. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All r ights reserved.