Service Management controls how business services are developed and delivered to customers. Business services must be flexible negotiable between customer and provider. Temporal attributes are important and in most cases resources are involved and for customer satisfaction as well as for efficient usage an optimization of resources is required. Often business services are aggregated from services from different organizations. To enable efficient construction, basic services and the information content should be standardized as far as possible without constraining the flexibility. This paper presents an approach and a prototypical implementation to search, reserve and book resources based on Web services. Groups of resources are managed by an organization’s information system which contains a database for storing the expected usage of the resources and some business logic expressed by means of explicit business rules. A distributed resource management system uses the Web services to build up a complex service for customers asking for different resources. This architecture is applicable in many domains. As a showcase, organization of facilities is presented for a scientific conference.

Two types of Web services are distinguished: simple resource management services and complex inter-organizational services. Simple Web services must be designed so that they can be reused easily for different business processes. The interface consisting of service name as well as input and output arguments should be understandable and based on standards (e.g. definition of temporal arguments). For automatic planning based on the state-based approach, Web service input parameters should be interpreted as pre-conditions for execution of a Web service and output parameters should be seen as results. Further parameters should be available for trust management. Complex services can be composed from simple services by integration into business processes or by automatic composition. Temporal constraints and their management seems to be a generic task required here.