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A Service Level Agreement Language for Dynamic Electronic Services

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Abstract

This paper proposes a novel language for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for dynamic and spontaneous electronic services. In a cross-organizational setting, it is important for customers of a service to obtain, monitor and enforce quality of service (QoS) guarantees by service providers, usually expressed in the form of SLAs. Since the supervision and management of SLAs and the provisioning of corresponding systems should be automated for economic reasons, we need a formal language to define an SLA. If, moreover, providers and customers want to sign custom-made SLAs, the SLA language, correspondingly, must provide a large degree of flexibility.

The SLA language described in this paper aims at providing the needed flexibility by means of an XML-based representation and a runtime system for SLAs. Using this language, parties to an SLA can describe how parameters are measured and computed from raw metrics, the guarantees they want with respect to those parameters and the involvement of third parties to, e.g., independently verify SLA compliance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, PO Box 704, Yorktown, NY, 10598, USA

    Heiko Ludwig, Alexander Keller, Asit Dan & Richard King

  2. IBM Software Group, PO Box 12195, RTP, NC, 27709, USA

    Richard Franck

Authors
  1. Heiko Ludwig
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  2. Alexander Keller
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  3. Asit Dan
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  4. Richard King
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  5. Richard Franck
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Correspondence to Heiko Ludwig.

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Ludwig, H., Keller, A., Dan, A. et al. A Service Level Agreement Language for Dynamic Electronic Services. Electronic Commerce Research 3, 43–59 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021525310424

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021525310424

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