Partner assessment using MADM and ontology for telecom operators

Abstract

Nowadays, the revenue of telecom operators generated by traditional services declined dramatically while the value added services involving 3 rd party value added service providers (partners) are becoming the most prominent source of revenue growth. To regulate the behaviours of the partners and make the operators be able to select best service for end users, a flexible partner assessment framework is required. This paper 1) presents a flexible partner assessment framework based on Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) method for telecom operators to adapt to the changing requirements of value-added services; 2) proposes ontology to model the complicated relationship in the assessment factors to achieve high extensibility for the increasing decision knowledge. From our study, the method adopted and the system proposed can handle the partner assessment problem and support service selection reasonably in telecom industry.