Supporting Service Level Agreement with Service Discovery

Abstract

Service Level Agreement (SLA) has been used as an effective way to evaluate and enforce the quality of services and their providers. However, despite the development in the area, the creation, maintenance, and evolution of SLAs are not easy tasks. This chapter presents an approach to support the creation of SLAs during the development of service-based systems. Said approach is based on an iterative service discovery process, in which services that can provide the functionalities and satisfy properties and constraints of service-based systems during their design phase are identified and used to (re-)formulate service level agreements between services participating in the system, as well as the design models of these systems. The discovery process is based on service requests expressing structural, behavioral, and quality characteristics of the system being developed. These requests are matched against different types of service specifications. The information represented in the service specifications of the matched services is used to generate service level agreements and the design models of the service-based systems.