Negotiation of Service Level Agreements: An Architecture and a Search-Based Approach

Software systems built by composing existing services are more and more capturing the interest of researchers and practitioners. The envisaged long term scenario is that services, offered by some competing providers, are chosen by some consumers and used for their own purpose, possibly, in conjunction with other services. In the case the consumer is not anymore satisfied by the performance of some service, he can try to replace it with some other service. This implies the creation of a global market of services and poses new requirements concerning validation of exploited services, security of transactions engaged with services, trustworthiness, creation and negotiation of Service Level Agreements with these services. In this paper we focus on the last aspect and present our approach for negotiation of Service Level Agreements. Our architecture supports the actuation of various negotiation processes and offers a search-based algorithm to assist the negotiating parts in the achievement of an agreement.