Denis Saure, Anshul Sheopuri, Huiming Qu, Hani Jamjoom and Assaf Zeevi
IEEE Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics (SOLI)
QingDao, China, July 2010
Abstract. We study a reservation system with finite computing resources
over an infinite horizon, where a set of incumbent
users submit reservation requests for computing
resources ahead in time. Computing resources may be
purchased in exchange for tokens. We use the
Multinomial Logit (MNL) framework to model customer
substitution behavior. Given user requests, the
objective is to maximize system performance, defined
as the proportion of customers that obtain their
preferred time slot, by adjusting resource prices in
tokens per unit of time and per computing resource.
We consider a class of pricing policies called
Time-of-Use (ToU), and propose a simple and
intuitive algorithm that is provably optimal for an
approximation to our formulated problem. Our
proposed solution has the appealing property of
flattening demand over the horizon. We evaluate the
performance of our approach numerically. For the set
of problem instances that we consider, the optimal
ToU policy outperforms single pricing strategies by
3-8% for Customer Satisfaction, on average. We
discuss the implementation of our proposed approach
for Cloud Computing being developed by IBM at the
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
(KAUST).
Bibtex.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-SOLI-10,
author = {Denis and Saure and Anshul and Sheopuri and Huiming and Qu and and Hani Jamjoom and Assaf and Zeevi},
title = {{Time-Of-Use Pricing Policies for Offering Cloud Computing as a Service}},
booktitle = {IEEE Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics (SOLI)},
address = {QingDao, China},
month = {July},
year = {2010}
}