Outsourced invoice service: Service-clearing as SaaS in mobility service marketplaces

Abstract

The paper presents a Software as a Service approach for individual and outsourced service clearing within Business-to-Business marketplaces for mobility services. Interviewed experts confirm the lack of clearing possibilities within today's marketplaces solutions for mobility services and emphasize the need for service clearing. However, current solutions have no interfaces in place to enable access upon data which is required to perform service clearing and to charge service transactions. The paper discusses interfaces for outsourced service clearing according to their design, data and role dependencies. A reference implementation is developed which enable individual and outsourced service clearing. An algorithm for service clearing has been developed to check the interfaces' reliability and data correctness. Individual service clearing enables marketplace participants to appoint a clearing provider of whom they think fits their clearing requirements best. The introduced and implemented interfaces contribute to protocol standardization within the mobility service domain.