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Autonomous service level agreement negotiation for service composition provision
Abstract
Efficient management of service level agreements which specify mutually-agreed understandings and expectations of service provision has been a subject of research for a few years. A critical issue in this area is for service consumers and service providers to effectively achieve agreements on non-functional aspects of service provision, such as quality of service. However, this issue has not been well addressed, especially in the context of service composition provision which implies the establishment of a set of interrelated agreements on quality of service between the service consumer and multiple service providers offering various services in the composition. There is a lack of supporting frameworks and techniques to automatically and dynamically achieve agreements on quality of service constraints for individual services in a service composition, aiming at fulfilling composition’s end-to-end quality of service requirements.This paper reports the authors’ recent research in addressing this issue, using the agent technology. In this research, the service level agreements for a service composition are established through autonomous agent negotiation. To enable this, an innovative framework is proposed in which the service consumer is represented by a set of agents who negotiate quality of service constraints with the service providers for various services in the composition. This negotiation is well coordinated in order to achieve end-to-end quality of service requirements. Based on this framework, a new negotiation protocol is presented to support coordinated negotiation. A utility-function-based decision-making model is proposed based on which agents can proactively decide on the course of further actions. Moreover, this paper also contributes the novel design of the negotiation Web service on the service providers’ side for the purpose of interoperability. Finally, the prototype implementation for the purpose of proof-of-concept is discussed.
... Given diverse QoS requirements from users, a tailored Service Level Agreement (SLA) is highly required for a flexible service selection scheme [7]. To be more specific, an SLA is defined by the QoS committed by the service provider and associated payment which the user is obliged to afford. ...
... In the area of multi-criteria optimization, lexicographical techniques [11] grants the highest optimization priority to the most important objective, matching the interests of maxmin fairness. As a result, our service selection scheme based on max-min fairness can be rigorously formulated as a lexicographical maximization problem, theoretically defined as the objective function (4) subject to (5)- (7). In the scenario of our work, there exist two main types of constraints which are user constraints and provider constraints. ...
... x n i,j Q i,j (9) Then, let (9) substituted into the objective function (8), then we have the single-objective problem represented in another non-linear form (10), subject to (5)- (7). ...
... The purpose of a strategy is maximizing the utility of negotiation parties in possible shortest time. In general, there are two basic strategies for generating a counter proposal, concession and trade-off [16]. Section 6 will explain the researches of both strategies. ...
... In tradeoff approach, negotiator concedes undesired parameters but propose more favorable values for important ones such that the utility of new proposal to be equal to the previous proposal. The tradeoff approach was introduced by Yan et al. [16] for negotiating over the QoS of web services. Researchers may use different factors to make tradeoff. ...
... Researchers may use different factors to make tradeoff. For example, Yan et al. [16] and Son and Sim [28] considered opponent's behavior to design a tradeoff algorithm. Zheng et al. [19] used a pre-defined value called the degree of tradeoff. ...
Negotiation is used when two or more parties with conflicting goals pursue their own interests. Service trading in cloud computing is a case in which automated negotiation system (ANS) can be used to achieve high satisfaction levels for both contract parties. An ANS allows the parties negotiate automatically on some parameters that are important for them. Multiple services are combined together to provide a composite service that delivers a value-added service to consumers. With the increasing tendency to use composite cloud services, there is a need for designing ANSs capable of fulfilling requirements of consumers of these services. Unlike existing ANSs which support negotiation of single service, our proposed ANS supports negotiation of composite service. This work also proposes a novel negotiation strategy to enhance satisfaction of both trading parties. Some simulations were carried out to evaluate the performance of proposed negotiation strategy in terms of negotiating agents’ utility and negotiation speed. Analysis of the results of simulations shows that our recommended strategy provides more performance than the others.
... QoS negotiation for web services was also investigated by the researchers. Yan et al. [44] is one of the important works in this area, the main idea of which was applied to mixed strategy CCSN works. Their work proposed a QoS negotiation system for web service composition to ensure end-to-end QoS in the composite service. ...
... The main idea is to provide a composite service for other distributed computing environments. 2 Mixed negotiation strategy: Yan et al. [44] presented two algorithms to generate P/CP. One of them is to seek a point with a determined concession amount within the acceptance range. ...
... Chhetri et al. [39] JADE framework & WS2JADE toolkit √ ---Yan et al. [44] JADE framework & WS2JADE toolkit √ ---Brandic et al. [16] Not simulated/implemented ----Song and Zhang [14] Not mentioned -√ √ Average joint utilities, Success rate Sim [31] Not simulated/implemented ----Sim [2] JADE framework -√ √ Average joint utilities, Negotiation speed, Success rate Dastjerdi and Buyya [40] CloudSim toolkit -√ √ Average consumer profit, Average provider profit Siebenhaar et al. [38] Not mentioned -√ √ Average utility of consumers, Average utility of providers, Success rate Zheng et al. [30] NetBeans IDE 6.9.1 & JDK 6u21 -√ -A v e r a g e utility of consumers, Average utility of providers, Average joint utilities, Success rate Son and Sim [23] JADE framework -√ -A v e r a g e joint utilities, Negotiation speed, Success rate Alsrheed et al. [52] Not mentioned -√ -A v e r a g e joint utilities Zheng et al. [53] Not mentioned -√ -A v e r a g e utility of consumers, Average utility of providers, Average joint utilities, Success rate Wu et al. [54] Not mentioned -√ √ Average consumer satisfaction levels, Average provider profit, Negotiation speed, Success rate Najjar et al. [47] GENIUS platform -√ -A v e r a g e utility of users, Total cost paid to rent resources Shojaiemehr and Rafsanjani [55] Not mentioned √ √ √ Average utility of buyers, Negotiation speed Messina et al. [56] Not simulated/implemented ----Yaqub et al. [57] Repast simulation tool -√ √ Average utility of consumers, Average utility of providers, Average joint utilities, Pareto-optimal bids Zheng et al. [29] NetBeans IDE 7.2.1 & JDK 7u13 -√ -A v e r a g e joint utilities, Negotiation speed, Success rate Chen et al. [58] Not mentioned √ -√ Average joint utilities, Average utility of consumers, Average utility of providers Parhi et al. [21] JADE framework, Jena SemWeb library, Protégé ontology editor √ ---Ishikawa and Fukuta [59] Not mentioned √ ---Omezzine et al. [60] Not simulated/implemented ----Son and Sim [46] JADE framework -√ √ Average joint utilities, Negotiation speed, Computational load Shojaiemehr and Rafsanjani [49] MATLAB software √ -√ Average utility of buyers, Average of equality Ranaldo and Zimeo [50] Not mentioned -√ √ Average utility of consumers, Price of services tained in Table 3 . As shown in the figure, the most important metrics are the average utility of consumers/buyers/users, average joint utility, success rate, average utility of providers, and negotiation speed. ...
Features of cloud computing services have created a significant trend of organizations opting for these services. In this situation, many consumers, who want a certain service, and many providers, who supply those services, form a competitive market. Consumers compete with each other to get a service with the desired functional and nonfunctional requirements. There is also a competition space among the providers to sell their services to the consumers. Since there is a dynamic competitive market and conflicting requirements of consumers and providers, it is essential that automated negotiation mechanisms be proposed to reach agreements and provide the maximum utility for both trading parties. To the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive study and review of cloud computing service negotiation (CCSN) exist as of now. In this article, we study the CCSN models. We investigate frameworks, techniques, protocols, and strategies proposed by the CCSN researches. Some questions will be proposed, and answers to the questions may help researchers design more efficient models in future works. Valuable innovations are explained and evaluated to find the answers to the questions. Statistics can specify some defects that must be addressed in future researches. The contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) reviewing CCSN works to understand open issues and challenges in providing negotiation systems in the cloud environments, (2) identifying the characteristics of an efficient CCSN that can provide the maximum utility for the trading parties, and (3) pointing out the defects of the current works to help researchers improve the CCSN systems in future researches.
... An interesting challenge in such a dynamic service composition is to perform it in an environment where the services offered are accompanied by the relevant SLAs, and these SLAs are the outcome of the negotiation process. A framework for lifetime SLA management with autonomous agents that involves negotiation of QoS constraints [11,20]. However, no prototype was built and the scenarios were only simulated and tested. ...
... A framework proposed by [20] deals with automated negotiation in the context of composite web services. Algorithms for trade-off and concession have been proposed for generating counter-proposals in negotiation. ...
... According to this protocol, both the seller and the buyer can make offers. An extended version of the bargaining protocol, FIPA Iterated Contract Net Interaction Protocol [9,20] which supports web services and SOA environment is used by QUANCE. In a service-oriented environment, an online auction can be deployed, located, and invoked by an automated negotiation system. ...
With the advent of web services, Quality of Service (QoS) serves as a benchmark to differentiate various available services and their providers. QoS characterizes the nonfunctional aspects of a web service and plays a crucial role in the area of dynamic composition of web services. There have been many works on QoS-based negotiation and service selection in deriving an appropriate web service composition. However, automated negotiation is more complex in the context of composite services. The negotiation between a service provider for a composite service and a requester has to be translated into complex one-to-many negotiations that involve the providers of the component services. In this context, this paper proposes an approach, namely, QUANCE that automates the negotiation of QoS parameter values between the service consumer and the service provider of a composite service in a service-oriented environment. This approach is tested using scenarios of an e-governance application that caters to the various operations related to vehicle registration.
... Linear utilities are assumed in most of the works in negotiation literature (e.g. Yu et al. 2013;Matos et al. 1998;Yan et al. 2007;Klein et al. 2003;Restificar and Haddawy 2004) but there are many works that consider non-linear utility functions (Bosse and Jonker 2005;Sánchez-Anguix et al. 2013;Klein et al. 2003;Ito et al. 2007;Lai et al. 2008). ...
... The acceptance condition AC prev denotes that agent A will accept an offer from agent B when the utility of the offer is greater than the utility of the previous offer sent by A to B (Yan et al. 2007;Ros and Sierra 2006). ...
Negotiation is a complex process. The decision making involved in several stages of negotiation makes its automation complex. In this paper we present a life cycle model of a negotiation agent in which we identify the individual components that comprise automated negotiation and the interactions between those components. We
present a survey of methods used in the automated negotiation literature fitting them to the components of our life cycle model. While discussing the opponent modeling component, we present the taxonomy of opponent models. The life cycle model is
generic enough to accommodate most of the frameworks in the literature. To this end we fit the methods used in some of the automated negotiation frameworks in the literature to the life cycle.
... Linear utilities are assumed in most of the works in negotiation literature (e.g. Yu et al. 2013;Matos et al. 1998;Yan et al. 2007;Klein et al. 2003;Restificar and Haddawy 2004) but there are many works that consider non-linear utility functions (Bosse and Jonker 2005;Sánchez-Anguix et al. 2013;Klein et al. 2003;Ito et al. 2007;Lai et al. 2008). ...
... The acceptance condition AC prev denotes that agent A will accept an offer from agent B when the utility of the offer is greater than the utility of the previous offer sent by A to B (Yan et al. 2007;Ros and Sierra 2006). ...
Negotiation is a complex process. The decision making involved in several stages of negotiation makes its automation complex. In this paper we present a lifecycle model of a negotiation agent in which we identify the individual components that comprise automated negotiation and the interactions between those components. We present a survey of methods used in the automated negotiation literature fitting them to the components of our lifecycle model. While discussing the opponent modeling component, we present the taxonomy of opponent models. The lifecycle model is generic enough to accommodate most of the frameworks in the literature. To this end we fit the methods used in some of the automated negotiation frameworks in the literature to the lifecycle.
... To this end, making SLAs digital is crucial to enterprise digitization in the following sense. First, mainstream scholarly work [5,37,63] and industry patents [13,15,55] in the field are centered around making SLAs digitally descriptive for the sake of analysis, monitoring and automation [10,12]. Second, the concept of SLA matters not only in enterprise computing but also in the field of industry management [6,18,64]. ...
... In general, management of SLAs has been researched out in the past couple of years resulting mainly in the definition of languages and standards for the specification of SLAs [9,24]. Other work in this line of research particularizes the management of SLAs to specific domains [11,20,63]. A great deal of effort has been put in devising techniques and machinery for monitoring service level agreements [2,12,14,21]. ...
As service-orientation gathers traction in enterprise engineering, more and more business processes and capabilities alike are wrapped up and viewed as services in today’s digital enterprises. Digital servitization is neither a rebranding nor a syntax sugar in enterprise engineering. It opens the door to innovative business models, novel system architecture, to name just a few. Central to service provisioning is the notion of commitment that captures contractual agreements between the provider and the consumer of the service in question, describing not only computer-interpretable factors (e.g., reliability, payment), but also business rules (e.g., service penalty) of the commitment. Widely known as the service level agreement, this building block of service-oriented enterprise engineering is pushed towards virtual when it comes to digital servitization. In this article, we propose a descriptive framework for digital enterprise services together with devised techniques for the alignment and reinforcement of the service level agreement. The relevance and applicability of the multi-perspective approach to service engineering are among our findings, which are illustrated using a few examples and a real-life case-study.
... Given diverse QoS requirements from users, a tailored Service Level Agreement (SLA) is highly required for a flexible service selection scheme to propose a satisfying service assignment plan [17]. To be more specific, an SLA is defined by the QoS committed by the service provider and associated payment which the user is obliged to afford. ...
... Proof: The coefficient matrix with the property of total unimodularity guarantees the integral optimum of the LP problem (21), which is also the optimal solution to the problem (17). Besides, the optimal scheme obtained from the problem (17) also coincides with the one to the problem (10). ...
The increasing momentum of service-oriented architecture has led to the emergence of divergent delivered services, where service selection is meritedly required to obtain the target service fulfilling the requirements from both users and service providers. Despite many existing works have extensively handled the issue of service selection, it remains an open question in the case where requests from multiple users are performed simultaneously by a certain set of shared candidate services. Meanwhile, there exist some constraints enforced on the context of service selection, e.g. service placement location and contracts between users and service providers. In this paper, we focus on the QoS-aware service selection with constraints from a fairness aspect, with the objective of achieving max-min fairness across multiple service requests sharing candidate service sets. To be more specific, we study the problem of fairly selecting services from shared candidate sets while service providers are self-motivated to offer better services with higher QoS values. We formulate this problem as a lexicographical maximization problem, which is far from trivial to deal with practically due to its inherently multi-objective and discrete nature. A fairness-aware algorithm for concurrent service selection (FASS) is proposed, whose basic idea is to iteratively solve the single-objective subproblems by transforming them into linear programming problems. Experimental results based on real-world datasets also validate the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed approach.
... Heuristics approaches have been investigated to find near-optimal combinations in dynamic environments. In this research line, negotiation mechanisms were shown to be a suitable approach to deal with QoS-aware SBAs [24], [5], [10]. Some approaches rely on bilateral one-to-one negotiation mechanisms such as in [24], [21], not allowing competition among providers. ...
... In this research line, negotiation mechanisms were shown to be a suitable approach to deal with QoS-aware SBAs [24], [5], [10]. Some approaches rely on bilateral one-to-one negotiation mechanisms such as in [24], [21], not allowing competition among providers. In other approaches nego-tiation occurs after an optimization phase, but only among the providers that do not provide the expected QoS local values [2]. ...
Service mashups represent an appealing business opportunity for companies since value added applications can be provided to fulfill clients’ needs by integrating their services with the ones available on the Internet accessible according to standard Web Services technologies. Clients’ needs are usually expressed in terms of a required functionality that can be obtained as a mashup application, together with specified QoS requirements referring to non-functional characteristics of the application, such as price, time, reliability. In order to make this opportunity a reality, mechanisms allowing for automatic selection and composition of services are necessary to avoid human intervention in the composition process. Here, a framework for automatic mashup of Cloud services taking into account QoS users’ preferences, is presented. It relies on both AI planning techniques for automatic service composition, and software agent negotiation to select a composition that meets the specified QoS preferences. It allows for a dynamic QoS-based mashup of services since the QoS values provided for the single services in the composition are not fixed, but they could vary according to the providers’ strategy. The proposed approach can be applied when services are provided in the context of a competitive market of service providers.
... To overcome such limitations, a few researchers exploited trade-off, concession, and behavior learning strategies by providing a certain degree of sacrifice (concession) in their UV [11,12]. The concession strategy considers the degree of sacrifice to be based on time, opportunity, and competition functions. ...
... The CO involved in the composite service negotiation can be computed as shown in Eq. (11). This computation denotes the summation of the SCA's interaction with the ITBA and the ITBA's interaction with the SPA, respectively. ...
One of the major challenges in cloud computing is the development of a service-level agreement (SLA) negotiation framework using an intelligent third-party broker negotiation strategy. Current frameworks exploit various negotiation strategies using game theoretic, heuristic, and argumentation-based approaches for obtaining optimal negotiation with a better success rate (negotiation commitment). However, these approaches fail to optimize the negotiation round (NR), total negotiation time (TNT), and communication overhead (CO) involved in the negotiation strategy. To overcome these problems, certain researchers have exploited trade-off, concession, and behavioral learning strategies with varying degrees of sacrifices (reductions) in their concerned proposal generation. Such sacrifices can prevent negotiation break-off and optimize the negotiation strategy to an extent with fewer NRs, less TNT, and less CO. It maximizes the utility value and the success rate. To further optimize the negotiation strategy and prevent negotiation break-off, a bulk negotiation behavioral learning (BNBL) approach is proposed. This approach uses the reinforcement learning negotiation strategy to provide varying degrees of sacrifice for obtaining an optimal result. Hence, the proposed automated dynamic SLA negotiation framework (ADSLANF) using the BNBL approach will reduce the NRs, TNT, and CO. It also significantly maximizes the utility value and success rate (SLA commitment) among negotiation parties such as service consumers and service providers.
... The adoption of software agents for SLA negotiation was already proposed in several recent works, for Grid Computing (Ouelhadj et al., 2005) and Cloud Computing (Yan et al., 2007;Buscemi and Montanari, 2007;Alhamad et al., 2010;Zulkernine and Martin, 2011). ...
... In Yan et al. (2007) software agents are exploited for SLA negotiation in the context of service composition. They designed a framework on which a set of agents negotiate quality of service constraints with the providers for the various services should be part of the composition. ...
The emergence of complex cloud services and the growing number of QoS metrics entail the need of automation to transform business requirements into QoS constraints. Furthermore, in the emergent context of Cloud Federations providers need to share knowledge to improve interoperability when negotiating SLA Service Level Agreements. Intelligent software agents are capable of supporting activities related to SLA negotiation, as well as sharing knowledge into large-scale distributed environments. Since they are usually provided with different ontologies, understanding the meaning of the messages requires the availability of common, global ontologies among customers and providers. In order to deal with this issue, we discuss a multi-agent SLA negotiation protocol which does not need a common global agent ontology. The protocol takes into account different concerns related to the understanding of semantic and technical terms, and the knowledge about the agent abilities on semantic and technical terms are shared among the Cloud Federation.
... Agent negotiation is a form of decision making where agents jointly explore possible solutions in order to reach an agreement [33,25,11,8]. In recent decades, agent negotiation technology has been widely developed to solve issues in different areas, such as business transactions in e-commerce [3,9] and service management in cloud computing [32,13]. With the support of agent negotiation technology, many operations which originally required human intervention can be conducted automatically and intelligently by autonomous agents, and this 247 | P a g e means that very large amounts amount of time and money can be saved. ...
... Agent negotiation is a form of decision making where agents jointly explore possible solutions in order to reach an agreement [33,25,11,8]. In recent decades, agent negotiation technology has been widely developed to solve issues in different areas, such as business transactions in e-commerce [3,9] and service management in cloud computing [32,13]. With the support of agent negotiation technology, many operations which originally required human intervention can be conducted automatically and intelligently by autonomous agents, and this 247 | P a g e means that very large amounts amount of time and money can be saved. ...
Negotiation is the emergent functionality of automated E-Commerce. There are several approach deployed by various researcher in there automated E-Commerce model. In this research review paper we provide a review on various negotiation mechanism which are deployed in various E-Commerce model
... Negotiation is adopted in situations where interest conflicts are detected and cannot be ignored. Hence, it will help to make an effective decision in a negotiation process which is critical to the success of the negotiation [1,39]. The conflict resolution challenges identified in this research include multiple stakeholders with varying goals that need to resolve the mismatching goals [2]. ...
Requirements negotiation involves discussion on the requirements conflict to have some compromise that will satisfy the participating stakeholders of a software project. The output of a requirement negotiation is a set of satisfied requirements of two or more parties. In this paper, we present a systematic review of requirements negotiation challenges. The study adopted 34 papers from the final study selection process which were analyzed based on the requirements negotiation challenges they addressed. The identified challenges are decision-making, communication, performance, managing requirement changes, and conflict resolution. The output of the study indicates that decision-making is addressed by 33% of the studies reviewed, followed by the performance with 22%, conflict resolution with 19%, while 16% focus on stakeholders’ communication, and managing requirements changes has 10%.
... A Negotiation Broker (NB) middleware framework [17] facilitates automated negotiations of SLAs for Web services in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). High level business goals, contexts, preferences, constraints, and values of the negotiation issues are expressed as a policy specification by each of the negotiating parties. ...
The Service Level Agreements (SLA) are e- Contracts that need to be established among business partners and monitored to ensure that web services comply with the agreed Quality of Service values. Establishment of SLA among the component services of a composite service and the users becomes important. The establishment is time consuming when done manually because it involves negotiation of parameters to be agreed by the participants. Hence an algorithm is proposed for automated negotiation and a framework for automated contract establishment is designed and implemented. For web services to be successful, privacy must be protected. Today, privacy has become more important concern for both users and web service provider. More people will use web services if they feel all the information released are secure enough. Privacy can often be guaranteed through security measures. To enable privacy protection for Web services, customers are allowed to specify their preferences about the disclosure of their information. In this paper its demonstrated with a suitable e-Business application of Purchase and Registration of Vehicles along with the privacy is ensured during composition of the individual web services for the customer's details.
... As before, these approaches are based on one-to-many concurrent and independent negotiations for each required component service. Attempts to propose a coordinated negotiation with all the providers of the different required services in a composition have been proposed, as in Yan et al. (2007), where a Negotiation Coordinator instructs the negotiation on the single component services by decomposing end-to-end QoS requirements in local QoS. Nevertheless, a decomposition approach prevents from deriving formal properties of the negotiation outcome since it is not possible to determine the most promising decomposition. ...
QoS-based service composition enables the development of complex business applications. They are composed of distributed services characterized by QoS attributes representing non-functional characteristics, such as cost, execution time, and reliability. With the proliferation of services on the Internet, more candidates for each component service may be available with different QoS values. Hence, the ones satisfying QoS global constraints required for the application have to be selected. Automated negotiation is adopted to select component services in a dynamic market of services where provided QoS values may vary according to different market strategies. Nevertheless, when dealing with multiple QoS attributes, multiple service providers, and not shared information, it is difficult to guarantee the formal properties of the negotiation outcomes. In the present work, we propose a trade-off negotiation strategy that allows reaching a Pareto-optimal agreement, if it exists. The agreement consists of the QoS values of component services that are the ones selected to provide the complete application. The strategy exploits both the competition, that is due to multiple services providing the same functionality with different QoS values, and the cooperation among the providers of the different component services, that are necessary to meet the required end-to-end QoS constraints.
... Proses SLA adalah kewajiban kontraktual antara penyedia dan pelanggan layanan dengan menentukan pemahaman dan harapan yang disepakati bersama mengenai penyediaan layanan (Yan et al., 2007). Inti dari SLA adalah spesifikasi jaminan layanan, yang menentukan jaminan fungsional dan nonfungsional dari penyediaan layanan. ...
Kegiatan perjalanan dinas dilakukan di hampir seluruh satuan kerja (satker) pada kementerian/lembaga. Tren pagu anggaran belanja perjalanan dinas cenderung mengalami kenaikan setiap tahun. Berdasarkan hasil kajian oleh Ditjen Perbendaharaan dalam Spending review Tahun 2017, ditemukan inefisiensi pada belanja perjalanan dinas sebesar Rp349,13 miliar. Dalam empat tahun terakhir, anggaran belanja perjalanan dinas selalu menjadi pos yang dilakukan pemotongan dan penghematan anggaran. Kebijakan pemotongan anggaran mempunyai dampak psikologis terhadap negara karena terkait langsung dengan kepercayaan publik. Perlu dipertimbangkan metode lain untuk meningkatkan efisiensi belanja perjalanan dinas, salah satunya dengan shared services yang menjadi inisiatif transformasi di Kementerian Keuangan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengidentifikasi manfaat shared services dalam meningkatkan efisiensi perjalanan dinas dan menggambarkan proses bisnis perjalanan dinas dengan model shared services. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini yaitu kualitatif dengan pendekatan eksploratif. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa efisiensi belanja perjalanan dinas dapat ditingkatkan dengan model shared services karena adanya skala ekonomi yang terjadi dengan memusatkan fungsi administrasi. Dalam mendukung shared services, perlu dilakukan perubahan dalam mekanisme pelaksanaan perjalanan dinas.
... This thesis adopts "service level agreement" to formulate the contracts and regulations between them. Service level agreement may have different definitions in different contexts (Jin et al., 2002;Fawaz et al., 2004;Kowalczyk et al., 2007;Klimova et al., 2015). However, usually a service level agreement is able to describe an agreement between service provider and service consumers which defines mutual understandings and expectations of a service. ...
The world industrial economy has been witnessing to step into service economyduring last two decades. Evidence can be easily found to prove it, such as the shift ofmore and more manufacturers from traditional product centric logic intoservice oriented logic, sharing economy’s growth in popularity over the last severalyears, changing their business model and renting the usage of the p roduct theymanufacture, etc. Product Service Systems (PSS), under this context, are seen as onesolution to help companies to address the servitization process. PSS captures a lot ofpractitioners and researchers’ attention because of its potential to sat isfy customers’requirements of more economical, more c ustomized and more sustainable services inthe modern service economy context. However, in the current marketplace, most PSSsolutions are pushed by providers based on their own capabilities and their internalpotential for innovations and unfortunately, they most of the time ignore real usagesand values for beneficiaries. In this context, functions of offerings (different scenariosof combinations of products and services) are sometimes useless and ov erlapped and alarge amount of waste is being produced when producing and implementing this kindof solution....
... We want to expand the impacts of our previous research in autonomous vehicles [32]- [35] and have better understanding of what people think of self-driving cars. We are especially interested in people's opinions toward the transitions from level 0: no automation to level 5: full automation [36], [37]. Although YouTube AV 50K already provides rich sources of data annotated by state-of-the-art NLP techniques, we aware of the shortages of the techiques; for example, doing aspect-level sentimental analysis and detecting sarcasm are still challenging. ...
With one billion monthly viewers, and millions of users discussing and sharing opinions, comments below YouTube videos are rich sources of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. We introduce the YouTube AV 50K dataset, a freely-available collections of more than 50,000 YouTube comments and metadata below autonomous vehicle (AV)-related videos. We describe its creation process, its content and data format, and discuss its possible usages. Especially, we do a case study of the first self-driving car fatality to evaluate the dataset, and show how we can use this dataset to better understand public attitudes toward self-driving cars and public reactions to the accident. Future developments of the dataset are also discussed.
... An SLA is a legal contract which includes service obligations, deliverability, service objectives and service violation penalties [4][5][6]. An SLA is not only used to measure the performance of the provider, it also helps to resolve disputes regarding consumer duties [7]. An SLA comprises one or more objectives, called service level objectives (SLO), which comprise one or many low-level metrics [8]. ...
In cloud computing, service level agreements (SLAs) are legal agreements between a service provider and consumer that contain a list of obligations and commitments which need to be satisfied by both parties during the transaction. From a service provider's perspective, a violation of such a commitment leads to penalties in terms of money and reputation and thus has to be effectively managed. In the literature, this problem has been studied under the domain of cloud service management. One aspect required to manage cloud services after the formation of SLAs is to predict the future Quality of Service (QoS) of cloud parameters to ascertain if they lead to violations. Various approaches in the literature perform this task using different prediction approaches however none of them study the accuracy of each. However, it is important to do this as the results of each prediction approach vary according to the pattern of the input data and selecting an incorrect choice of a prediction algorithm could lead to service violation and penalties. In this paper, we test and report the accuracy of time series and machine learning-based prediction approaches. In each category, we test many different techniques and rank them according to their order of accuracy in predicting future QoS. Our analysis helps the cloud service provider to choose an appropriate prediction approach (whether time series or machine learning based) and further to utilize the best method depending on input data patterns to obtain an accurate prediction result and better manage their SLAs to avoid violation penalties.
... Descriptions of negotiation frameworks such as in [13,18] elaborate on the importance of the WS-Agreement Negotiation standard without intro- ducing compliant strategies. The negotiation strategy introduced in [34] men- tions the WS-Agreement standard but does not use the WS-Agreement Nego- tiation standard. Instead, the strategy was developed to comply with the FIPA standard. ...
Today, the so called supermarket approach is used for trading Cloud services on Cloud markets. Thereby, consumers purchase Cloud services at fixed prices without negotiation. More dynamic Cloud markets are emerging as e.g. the recent development of the Amazon EC2 spot market shows - with spot blocks and spot fleet management. Hence, autonomous Bazaar-based negotiations are a promising approach for trading Cloud services on future Cloud markets. Thereby, market participants negotiate the characteristics of Cloud services which are described in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Specifications such as the WS-Agreement Negotiation standard foster the development of such Bazaar-based Cloud markets.
... Another active area of research is QoS aware composition [18][19][20]. Researchers apply SLA to compositions, but they do not considered dynamic composition. ...
As a result of state-of-the-art development in service oriented architecture, we need a composition framework and comprehensive algorithm to discover and compose the web services from different environments. In this paper, we present a unified semantic-oriented framework with corresponding algorithm for automatic web service composition that integrates the comprehensive process of modified multistage composition and rigor of web semantics. Our proposed unified algorithm introduces the novel features through modified five stage composition such as transformation of non-functional properties of user requirements to all stages, optimization and semantic validation of abstract workflows using workflow automata, annotating WSDL files with additional ontologies using ontology based service repository, adopting dynamic change of user requirements for discovering candidate services, and selecting most optimal services for concrete composition using non-functional properties are effectively represented. Feasible composition solution obtained for user complex requirements through semantic web service discovery mechanism for discovering and selecting the most suitable service candidates. Furthermore, our unified algorithm can provide a composition solution through wider acceptance of semantics-oriented documents such as web ontology language for services and web service modeling ontology. We evaluate the proposed unified algorithm for automatic generation of composition using our motivating scenario, namely, home loan approval inference process. We also evaluate algorithm for automated and dynamic composition on service repositories of various sizes in increasing the levels of nesting and present the performance results.
... For instance, management of SLAs has been researched out in the past couple of years resulting mainly in the definition of languages and standards for the specification of SLAs [2] [4]. Other work in this line of research particularizes the management of SLAs to specific domains [5] [7]. Linked USDL is an approach to enhancing semantics of agreement terms in SLA [8]. ...
With the rise of Internet of Things, end-users
expect to obtain data from well-connected smart devices and
stations through data services being provisioned in distributed
architectures. Such services could be aggregated in a number of
smart ways to provide the end-users and third-party applications
with sophisticated data (e.g., weather data coupled with soil
pollution), resulting in a growing number of service offerings
to be requested. Service offerings that have been shortlisted for
a certain data request (e.g., rainfall in a particular farming
site) need to be ranked according to the end-users’ preference.
Service level agreements, i.e., the mutual responsibilities between
the service provider and its consumers, address this sort of
preference. Unfortunately, provisioning quality-aware services
under this term still stays on the sidelines. In this paper, we
propose a service architecture where the service level agreements
shall be: (i) accumulated overtime on IoT service transactions; (ii)
compiled when aggregating IoT services; (iii) used as a ranking
criterion for suggesting IoT service offerings.We demonstrate our
machinery in the services provisioning of agricultural datasets
taken from a farming site of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.
... The existing frameworks for SLA management only define the format and types of messages that can be exchanged during the negotiation between service providers and service consumers. Some projects particularize the management of SLAs to specific domains, such as military, database management, or information systems [8,13,25]. Garvin proposed a quality management grid featuring a total of eight dimensions including performance and reliability [11]. ...
... An underlying aspect of these scenarios, is that users in such large-scale open cloud environments are highly dynamic and usually have diverse QoS (Quality of Service, e.g., response time, availability) requirements. Thus a flexible service composition process is needed to establish a tailored SLA (Service Level Agreement) [7] to deliver a composite service elastically to meet users' requirements. A SLA specifies the QoS promised by service providers, as well as the corresponding price that a user should pay for using the service with the specified QoS. ...
... First, the role and impact of SLAs in federated environments are studied with relation to early IT outsourcing [7], open federated cloud computing [8] and QoS in federated cloud-based software defined networks [9]. Second, economics of SLAs are studied with regard to SLA negotiation for service composition in [10] and maximizing profits stemming from SLAs in [11]. Third, in the economics literature, specifically in the field of supply chains (which show structural similarities to service chains in multi-operator service delivery), contract design and information sharing is studied when there are competing supply chains in [12]; moreover, the coordination of information sharing is analyzed in [13]. ...
A majority of 5G verticals have the potential togenerate large revenues, but are expected to have strict Qualityof Service (QoS) guarantees, and are projected to be delivered asa service chain of multiple, independent operators. Such multi-operator service delivery requires a set of interdependent ServiceLevel Agreements (SLAs) between operators. The amount andaggregation-level of information shared between stakeholdersinside such SLAs will determine how efficient the coordinatedtraffic engineering between the operators will be. Sharing moredetails on one’s network is uncommon in today’s interactions dueto the fear of losing competitive advantage and regulations withregard to national security. In this paper, we analyze the economicincentives for information exchange in the context of multi-operator service delivery. We show that the current practice ofexchanging only highly aggregated information can lead to bothsignificant under- and overestimation of the risk of not meetinguser-facing Quality of Service guarantees. We also show thateconomic incentives for mutually sharing an optimal amount ofinformation do exist, and optimal information exchange betweenoperators is viable in the long run. Moreover, through a simplenumerical example, we demonstrate how the mutually sharedinformation and the resulting risk estimation affect the revenuesof the operators from the end-user market. We believe this workopens up a new line of research connecting the economics ofmulti-operator service delivery and network performability.
... In this context, MASs should include self-detection of failures and self-monitoring of cloud operations and services, QoS security negotiation and SLA management, service-level agreement negotiation [6] [7], cloud interoperability, cloud resource brokering, virtual machines and service migration policies, dynamic scheduling. They're designed to operate in a dynamically changing environment. ...
Cloud computing is becoming a key factor in computer science and an important technology for many organizations to deliver different types of services. The companies which provide services to customers are called as cloud service providers. The cloud users (CUs) increase and require secure, reliable and trustworthy cloud service providers (CSPs) from the market. So, ittextquoterights a challenge for a new customer to choose the highly secure provider. This paper presents a cloud service brokering system in order to analyze and rank the secured cloud service provider among the available providers list. This model uses an autonomous and flexible agent in multi-agent system (MASs) that have an intelligent behavior and suitable tools for helping the brokering system to assess the security risks for the group of cloud providers which make decision of the more secured provider and justify the business needs of users in terms of security and reliability.
... The existing frameworks for SLA management only define the format and types of messages that can be exchanged during the negotiation between service providers and service consumers. Some projects particularize the management of SLAs to specific domains, such as military, database management, or information systems [8,13,25]. Garvin proposed a quality management grid featuring a total of eight dimensions including performance and reliability [11]. ...
Business services arguably play a central role in service-based information systems as they fill in the gap between the technicality of Service-Oriented Architecture and the business aspects captured in Enterprise Architecture. Business services have distinctive features that are not typically observed in Web services, e.g. significant portions of the functionality of business services might be executed in a human-mediated fashion. As such, service level agreement (SLA) should be described as a mixture of human-mediated functionality (e.g., service penalty) and computer-interpretable measurement (e.g., reliability, payment). In this paper, we propose a formal framework for reasoning about the SLAs from the perspective of services bundling – the practice of innovatively organizing business services into a bulkier service offering that creates new values. Specifically, we (a) represent multi-level SLA of a business service in terms of service reliability, payment and penalty using the mathematical structure of semiring; (b) provide formality for aggregating SLAs of the constituent services that make up the service bundling; (c) make multi-level SLAs of a bundled service technically comparable. The main contribution of this work is a machinery for handling a large number of SLAs generated through services bundling, allowing to the service consumers to pick up the right service offering according to their preference.
... Some research methods focus on integrating agents with cloud services, and provide some negotiation strategies of cloud service configuration and composition (Preist et al., 2003;Jian et al., 2005). An agent-based testbed supporting the discovery of cloud resources and service-level agreements (SLA) negotiation (Yan et al., 2007;Buyya et al., 2009) is proposed in Sim (2009). Sim (2013) proposed several complex cloud negotiation mechanisms that support negotiation activities among three types of participants, i.e., consumer agents, broker agents and PAs, in interrelated e-markets for dynamic SLAs negotiation. ...
Cloud service selection with multi-type cloud computing resources is a novel research and catching increasing attention. To help users efficiently select and integrate their desired cloud services, the agent-based computing paradigm has emerged. In this work, we propose an intermediary service agent model called ISAM which lets each intermediary service agent manage some clustered cloud services of the same type. And based on this model, a dynamic cloud service selection strategy named DCS is given. The core of DCS uses an adaptive learning mechanism consisting of the incentive and forgetting functions, which is devised to dynamically perform the optimising service selections and to return integrated solutions to users. A set of dynamic cloud service selection algorithms are also presented to implement our mechanism. The results of the simulation experiments show that our strategy has better overall performance and efficiency in obtaining a high quality services solution.
In case of an emergency situation, it is required to come up with solutions quickly. The supporting decision-making process should therefore be based on relevant data sources which are fed to data processing pipelines. These data sources may however be located in different domains of distinct organizations. Although the technical realisation of cross-organizational data pipelines is possible, for example using a federated Kubernetes cluster managed by a central operator, it is unclear how those pipelines should be scheduled among the participating organizations. Firstly, the cross-organizational infrastructure is unknown and highly heterogeneous, and secondly, there may be undiscovered scheduling preferences present. The first issue can be solved using software probes, while the second issue will be solved through an extension of this probing concept. During the proposed inter-domain scheduling process, organizations may specify monetary reward requirements and requirements on the maximum load they wish to bear. The former allows administrators to specify a lower limit with respect to payment they request for their contribution, the latter allows the specification of an upper limit on the workload an organization wishes to process. This way, mismatching expectations on contribution level, which may potentially cause harm from the hosting organization perspective, are prevented, increasing the trust level of contributors. These kinds of requirements have nothing to do with the technical assessment of a node, but they do impact scheduling decisions and performance of an application, as shown in our evaluation. The proposed scheduling flow not only allows organizations to steer scheduling decisions, but also to negotiate requirements among each other, giving rise to ad hoc conflict resolution all the while collaborating in solving the emergency situation.
In scientific computing environments such as service grid environments, services are becoming basic collaboration components which can be used to construct a composition plan for scientists to resolve complex scientific problems. However, current service collaboration methods still suffer from low efficiency for automatically building composition plans because of the time-consuming ontology reasoning and incapability in effectively allocating resources to executing such plans. In this chapter, the authors present a QSQL-based collaboration method to support automatic service composition and optimized execution. With this method, for a given query, abstract composition plans can be created in an automatic, semantic, and efficient manner from QSQL (Quick Service Query List) which is dynamically built by previously processing semantic-related computing at service publication stage. Furthermore, concrete service execution instances can be dynamically bound to abstract service composition plans at runtime by comparing their different QoS(Quality of Service) values. Particularly, a concrete collaboration framework is proposed to support automatic service composition and execution. Totally, the authors’ proposed method will not only facilitate e-scientists quickly create composition plans from a large scale of service repository; but also make resource’s sharing more flexible. The final experiment has illustrated the effectiveness of their proposed method.
Cloud consumers need services that, in addition to meeting their business requirements, provide them with a certain level of quality of service (QoS). On the other hand, cloud providers desire to sale services corresponding to their preferences. In this situation, cloud computing service negotiation (CCSN) can be used to establish an agreement among trading parties with conflicting preferences. The CCSN allows consumer and provider negotiate together automatically on negotiable issues that are important for both trading parties. It aims to provide maximum utility for the parties in possible shortest time. In this paper, we propose a CCSN which provides simple or composite services to consumers. We introduce strategies that negotiators can choose from. We carry out some simulations to compare the performance of the strategies. Analysis of the results of simulations shows that our recommended strategy is more efficient in terms of negotiator's utility and the number of rounds spent on negotiation to reach an agreement than the others. The contributions of the proposed CCSN can be summarized as follows: (1) design and simulation of a new negotiation strategy which aims to maximize utility for both trading parties and increase the speed in reaching an agreement, (2) proposing a process for aggregating the results of negotiations on simple task requirements to ensure end-to-end composite service requirements.
Multi-tenant service-oriented systems (SOSs) have become a major software engineering paradigm in the cloud environment. Instead of serving a single end-user, a multi-tenant SOS provides multiple tenants with similar and yet customized functionalities and potentially different quality-of-service (QoS) values. Multiple tenants’ differentiated multi-dimensional quality constraints for the SOS further complicates the NP-hard problem of quality-aware service selection. Existing quality aware service selection approaches suffer from poor success rates of finding a solution, especially in scenarios where tenants’ quality constraints are stringent, due to the lack of systematic consideration of three critical issues: 1) the need to fulfil multiple tenants’ differentiated quality constraints; 2) the competition among service providers; and 3) the complementarity between services. This paper proposes a novel approach called Combinatorial Auction-based Service Selection for Multi-Tenant SOSs (CASSMT) to support effective quality-aware service selection for multi-tenant SOSs. CASSMT allows service providers to bid for the services of an SOS expressively. Based on received bids (i.e., QoS offers), CASSMT attempts to find a solution that achieves the system developer’s optimization goal while fulfilling all tenants’ quality constraints for the SOS. When no solu-tion can be found based on the current bids, service providers can improve their bids to increase their chances of winning, which in the meantime, increases the chances of finding a solution. The experimental results show that CASSMT outperforms representative approaches in the success rate of finding a solution and system optimality. Meanwhile, its efficiency, measured by the number of auction rounds and computation time, is demonstrated to be satisfactory in scenarios on different scales.
Today, the dominant market mechanism for trading cloud resources is the static supermarket approach where consumers buy resources from providers without negotiation. The recent development of Amazon's EC2 spot market shows that dynamic market mechanisms are gaining popularity. Dynamic market mechanism using multi-round bilateral negotiations - aka Bazaar negotiations - are a promising approach for trading cloud resources. On such a Bazaar-market consumers and providers negotiate cloud resources which are specified in SLAs. To foster the development of Bazaar-markets the Open Grid Forum released the WS-Agreement Negotiation standard. Currently, WS-Agreement Negotiation compliant strategies are missing. Hence, in the paper at hand we introduce a time dependent negotiation strategy which is compliant to the WS-Agreement Negotiation standard. For a systematic analysis of the strategy a market simulation environment is necessary. As existing scientific simulation environments are not able to simulate Bazaar-markets we extended the CloudSim framework by developing the so called Bazaar-Extension which implements the WS-Agreement Negotiation standard. Using the Bazaar-Extension cloud service consumers and providers can be created and strategies can be assigned to them. The so created market can be simulated and the resulting resource allocation can be analyzed. The architecture of the simulation framework as well as its evaluation are introduced in this paper.
Cloud computing is a set of processes in which a large group of remote servers communicating together so as to allow sharing data-processing tasks, data storage and online access to compute resources. Managing the drastically increasing number of requests presents the most challenging part of cloud computing. This paper discusses a novel hierarchy for optimizing load to achieve a high user satisfaction. By preserving data about the best cloud service providers, this hierarchy enhances the end user’s satisfaction. In other words, as it is proposed in this hierarchy, suppliers with a maximum number of satisfied requests are more likely to be selected as soon as they have available resources/services. On the other hand, when no provider is capable to accomplish the requested tasks, a possibility of cooperation between two or more cloud suppliers is presented as a second option to ensure 100% of user’s satisfaction. In order to apply such an approach, a huge amount of resources are wasted when the in-between communication is taking place. Therefore, an optimized method of SLA contract establishment is tackled in this paper.
Quality of Service (QoS) is often essential when the service consumer looks for a single service from a large pool. However, QoS of a composite service is aggregated in a rough way because the concrete service providers in the composition are seen as independent ones. In reality, business relationships such as dependencies and conflicts often exist among service providers, which unavoidably affect some QoS dimensions when the corresponding providers are selected to realise a composite service. Therefore, effects of business relationships must be analysed in the service selection process. This research proposes a composite service selection approach with the full consideration of business relationships. A formal business rule description language is defined to describe various types of business relationships and their effects on QoS. This research adopts the genetic algorithm to discover the near optimal service composition plan. Business rules are incorporated in computing fitness values and performing crossover and mutation functions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to handle various business rules properly in selection.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has introduced a phenomena of system's interaction with maximum users. With the development of high speed Internet services, the use of remote devices and software has rapidly increased. It has opened new gateways for renting out resources. The Cloud Service Chain is a process of ownership transfer of a service at different levels by different service providers. The concept of service chain poses novel challenges related to security, trust and privacy of data. In this chapter, we are introducing a mechanism of access control for Cloud service chains. We have discussed the realization of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to services of Federated-Cloud. When services are purchased in bundle, separate SLA is signed for each. We are also going to introduce a dynamic Role-Level Agreement (RLA) for such type of access control to services. The RLA will be an aggregated SLA for different services in a role. This will be helpful for service providers and the customers to sign a single document for a bundle rather than having separate one for every service.
Information Management Systems that outsource part of the functionality to other (likely unknown) services need an effective way to communicate with these services, so that a mutually beneficial solution can be generated. This includes bargaining for their optimal customizations and the discovery of overlooked potential solutions. In this article, we present an automated negotiation framework for information systems (denoted as WebNeg) that can be used by both the parties for conducting negotiations. WebNeg uses a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based approach for finding acceptable solutions in multiparty and multiobjective scenarios. The GA is enhanced using a new operator called Norm, which represents the cumulative knowledge of all the parties involved in the negotiation process. Norm incorporates the dependencies of different quality attributes of independently developed component services for the system composition. This enables WebNeg to find a better solution in the context of the current requirements. Experiment results indicate the applicability and improved performance of WebNeg (in comparison with existing similar works) in facilitating the negotiation management involved in a web service-based information composition process.
Composing existing services to create new services has been considered as an important activity of developing service-oriented architecture systems. The increment of services that provide the same functionality but different qualities leads to the complexity in finding the best solution for a composite service. In a heterogeneous and dynamic environment, QoS negotiation provides a flexible means for choosing suitable atomic services for service compositions. However, most proposed negotiation approaches assume that services are independent of others in terms of quality. Consequently, these negotiation approaches are not able to handle the correlation factors among services. This paper presents a flexible correlation-aware negotiation approach for service compositions. In our approach, the service correlations are considered as factors affecting the choice of concrete services. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via experiments.
Service composition plays a crucial role in service–oriented computing allowing to deliver complex distributed applications obtained by aggregating autonomous and independent component services characterized by a given functionality and a Quality of Service. Automated negotiation is a viable approach to select component services according to their QoS values so to meet the end–to–end quality requirements of users requesting the application. This paper discusses the use of Gaussian probability functions to model negotiation strategies of service providers, and how the properties of these functions can be used to model multiple negotiations necessary for service composition as a single multi–issue negotiation. A numerical analysis shows comparable negotiation trends for the different representations of the service composition problem.
This study highlights the optimal operation model for retailers to use in exploring the effect of customer loyalty and service quality on customer shopping preference. It offers a more profound understanding of the value of customer service and innovation in generic operation skills in international retailers (IR). This research uses the Likert and Semantic differential scale methods through the MTMM (multitrait-multimethod) to measure reliability, validity, and take two competing models to analyze the model fitness. The two competing model strongly shows the impact on channel retailers when they develop an optimal operation to probe the customer preference. The finding of Host Country Retailer (HCR) should reinforce their service quality by canvassing more customers shopping in the stores, and improve their service feedback speed. In a competition between the semantic scale of SEM and the Likert scale, measurements make it obvious that the Likert scale of SEM is more powerful. It's good for the retailers and business manager to have furthering understand the operation skill and service improvement. The leader of channel retailers should from mind to start targeting their goal and incremental market value to service more customers shopping preferences.
Web service composition (WSC) offers a range of solutions for rapid creation of complex applications by facilitating the composition of already existing concrete web services. One critical challenge in WSC is the dynamic selection of concrete services to be bound to the abstract composite service. In our research, we identify and elaborate on the challenges involved on developing a market-based mechanism for composite service selection. We propose a combinatorial procurement auction model as a useful approach to research service selection, in order to overcome the limitations of the current optimization-based and negotiation-based solutions. The proposed auction model supports dynamic pricing for the offered web services, enables the providers to express their preferences more fully, and creates the incentive for the providers to be truthful about the offered prices.
Citation: Krys Kochut, Amit Sheth, and John Miller, Optimizing Workflows, "Using a CORBA-based,fully distributed process to create scalable, dynamic systems," Component Strategies, March 1999.
SECOND-GENERATION workflow management systems need to deal with the heterogeneity of platforms within and across cooperating enterprises along with legacy applications and data. At the same time, there is an increasing demand for advanced features for supporting mission-critical processes, including adaptability through dynamic changes and scalability. The enterprise application development and workflow management system, Managing End-To-End Operations (METEOR), is based on open systems and standards, and it utilizes CORBA, Web, and Java. This allows METEOR to provide high-end workflow management combined with application and data integration capabilities in increasingly network-centric environments.
An abstract is not available.
We propose an efficient algorithm for estimation of possibility based
qualitative expected utility. It is useful for decision making mechanisms where
each possible decision is assigned a multi-attribute possibility distribution.
The computational complexity of ordinary methods calculating the expected
utility based on discretization is growing exponentially with the number of
attributes, and may become infeasible with a high number of these attributes.
We present series of theorems and lemmas proving the correctness of our
algorithm that exibits a linear computational complexity. Our algorithm has
been applied in the context of selecting the most prospective partners in
multi-party multi-attribute negotiation, and can also be used in making
decisions about potential offers during the negotiation as other similar
problems.
The paper proposes an approach for selecting partners in multi-agent negotiation with the use of possibilistic case-based
reasoning. It predicts the possibility of successful negotiation with other agents based on their past negotiation behaviour
and the derived qualitative expected utility for the current situation. The proposed approach allows the agents to select
their most prospective negotiation partners based on a small sample of historical cases of previous negotiations even if they
are different from the current situation. Partner selection models for both independent and correlated negotiation agents
are detailed and demonstrated with simple scenarios.
this paper is, therefore, to examine the space of negotiation opportunities for autonomous agents, to identify and evaluate some of the key techniques, and to highlight some of the major challenges for future automated negotiation research. This paper is not meant as a survey of the field of automated negotiation. Rather, the descriptions and assessments of the various approaches are generally undertaken with particular reference to work in which the authors have been involved. However, the specific issues raised should be viewed as being broadly applicable
Automated negotiation is a key form of interaction in systems that are composed of multiple autonomous agents. The aim of such interactions is to reach agreements through an iterative process of making offers. The content of such proposals are, however, a function of the strategy of the agents. Here we present a strategy called the trade-off strategy where multiple negotiation decision variables are traded-off against one another (e.g., paying a higher price in order to obtain an earlier delivery date or waiting longer in order to obtain a higher quality service). Such a strategy is commonly known to increase the social welfare of agents. Yet, to date, most computational work in this area has ignored the issue of trade-offs, instead aiming to increase social welfare through mechanism design. The aim of this paper is to develop a heuristic computational model of the trade-off strategy and show that it can lead to an increased social welfare of the system. A novel linear algorithm is presented that enables software agents to make trade-offs for multi-dimensional goods for the problem of distributed resource allocation. Our algorithm is motivated by a number of real-world negotiation applications that we have developed and can operate in the presence of varying degrees of uncertainty. Moreover, we show that on average the total time used by the algorithm is linearly proportional to the number of negotiation issues under consideration. This formal analysis is complemented by an empirical evaluation that highlights the operational effectiveness of the algorithm in a range of negotiation scenarios. The algorithm itself operates by using the notion of fuzzy similarity to approximate the preference structure of the other negotiator and then uses a hill-climbing technique to explore the space of possible trade-offs for the one that is most likely to be acceptable.
The adoption of Multi-Agent Systems for system engineering often requires legacy and human-oriented services to be integrated
into agent societies. In turn, this aspect impacts the engineering of interactive systems that involve the cooperation of
agents and (human) actors – such as, for instance, workflow management systems. In this context, the coordination model adopted
by the multi-agent system infrastructure strongly conditions the design, development and exploitation of available services.
In this work we address the issue of composing and coordinating services upon a suitable agent coordination infrastructure.
First, we discuss how the infrastructure’s metaphors and coordination artifacts can be exploited to support service integration,
and illustrate the envisioned scenarios making specific reference to the TuCSoN coordination infrastructure. Then, we discuss in detail the issue of the engineering of (possibly heterogeneous and legacy)
services: the case study of e-mail, file transfer, and web browsing services is finally presented.
Traditional approaches to software development - the ones embodied in CASE tools and modeling frameworks - are appropriate for building individual software components, but they are not designed to face the challenges of open environments. Service-oriented computing provides a way to create a new architecture that reflects components' trends toward autonomy and heterogeneity. We thus emphasize SOC concepts instead of how to deploy Web services in accord with current standards. To begin the series, we describe the key concepts and abstractions of SOC and the elements of a corresponding engineering methodology.
The development of Web services technologies as the foundation of a new generation of business-to-business (B2B) and enterprise application integration (EAI) architectures are discussed. Web services can glue together applications running on two different messaging product platforms, enable database information from one application to be made available to others. The broad use of Web services requires the technologies to be specified, standardized, realized in language bindings, and supported by interoperable products. It is suggested that if new software investments, support the use of Web services across multiple operating system platforms, disruption to environments will be minimized in order to gain the benefits of Web services technologies.
IT outsourcing practices have recently proliferated an interest in service level agreement (SLA) negotiation relevant to engagements with either in-house or external IS service providers. An important research gap exists in establishing Negotiation Support System (NSS) requirements for the processes associated with SLA development. A first step in specifying such requirements is to examine relevant theoretical bases to identify and postulate reasonable propositions. A second step is to examine the efficacy of the theory-based propositions using the constructs adapted in the context of a relevant, practical and exploratory scenario. Accordingly, this paper discusses propositions that rely on theoretical bases from relevant sociological models, it identifies constructs adapted from prior Theory W research in NSS as an exemplar, it discusses an exploratory study related to the research gap identified, and it discusses findings that represent a starting point for identifying SLA NSS requirements.
A Web service is defined as an autonomous unit of application logic that provides either some business functionality or information to other applications through an Internet connection. Web services are based on a set of XML standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). In particular, Web services discovery is the process of finding most appropriate Web services providers needed by a Web services requestor. One of the important issues in the discovery process is for Web services providers and Web services requestors to negotiate and find a solution that is acceptable to both sides. Thus, a more sophisticated business model with negotiation feature is required for this challenging research area. As there are increasing demands for negotiation technologies in the context of Web services, this paper proposes an independent declarative XML language called WS-Negotiation for Web services providers and requestors. In general, WS-Negotiation contains three parts: negotiation message, which describes the format for messages exchanged among negotiation parties, negotiation protocol, which describes the mechanism and rules that negotiation parties should follow, and negotiation decision making, which is an internal and private decision process based on a cost-benefit model or other strategies. This paper also presents a service level agreement (SLA) template model with different domain specific vocabularies for supporting different types of business negotiations in WS-Negotiation.
Increasingly, services such as E-commerce, Web hosting,
application hosting, etc., are being deployed over an infrastructure
that spans multiple control domains. These end-to-end services require
cooperation and internetworking between multiple organizations, systems
and entities. Currently, there are no standard mechanisms to share
selective management information between the various service providers
or between service providers and their customers. Such mechanisms are
necessary for end-to-end service management and diagnosis as well as for
ensuring the service level obligations between a service provider and
its customers or partners. In this paper we describe an architecture
that uses contracts based on service level agreements (SLA) to share
selective management information across administrative boundaries. We
also describe the design of a prototype implementation of this
architecture that has been used by us for automatically measuring,
monitoring, and verifying service level agreements for Internet services
The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online business-to-business (B2B) collaborations. In particular, the creation of value-added services by composition of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different quality of service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service. Two selection approaches are described and compared: one based on local (task-level) selection of services and the other based on global allocation of tasks to services using integer programming.
Fueled by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short business relationships. It appears highly likely that the next generation of e-Business systems will consist of an interconnection of services, each provided by a possibly different service provider, that are put together on an "on demand" basis to offer an end to end service to a customer. Such an environment, which we call Dynamic e-Business (DeB), will be administered and managed according to dynamically negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLA) between service providers and customers. Consequently, system administration will increasingly become SLA-driven and needs to address challenges such as dynamically determining whether enough spare capacity is available to accomodate additional SLAs, the negotiation of SLA terms and conditions, the continuous monitoring of a multitude of agreed-upon SLA parameters and the troubleshooting of systems, based on their importance for achieving business objectives. A key prerequisite for meeting these goals is to understand the relationship between the cost of the systems an administrator is responsible for and the revenue they are able to generate, i.e., a model needs to be in place to express system resources in financial terms. Today, this is usually not the case.
A fundamental problem with distributed applications is to map activities such as computation or data transfer onto a set of resources that will meet the application's requirement for performance, cost, security, or other quality of service metrics. An application or client must engage in a multi-phase negotiation process with resource managers, as it discovers, reserves, acquires, configures, monitors, and potentially renegotiates resource access. Current approaches to resource management tend to specialize for specific classes of resource (processor, network, etc.), and have addressed coordination across resources in a limited fashion, if at all. We present a generalized resource management model in which resource interactions are mapped onto a well defined set of platform-independent service level agreements (SLAs). We instantiate this model in the Service Negotiation and Acquisition Protocol (SNAP) which provides lifetime management and an at-most-once creation semantics for remote SLAs. The result is a resource management framework for distributed systems that we believe is more powerful and general than current approaches. We explain how SNAP can be deployed within the context of the Globus Toolkit.
In order to automate SLA management it is essential to specify SLAs in precise and unambiguous manner as well as keep the specification flexible. While precision will help automate the process of monitoring and metric collection, flexibility will enable extending it to unforeseen service level agreement specifications. Abstract: In order to automate SLA management it is essential to specify SLAs in precise and unambiguous manner as well as keep the specification flexible. While precision will help automate the process of monitoring and metric collection, flexibility will enable extending it to unforeseen service level agreement specifications.
Intelligent agent technology is a rapidly developing area of research. However, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of work being carried out under the agent banner. In this paper, software agent technology is introduced by briefly overviewing the various agent types currently under investigation by researchers.
Web services and software agent technologies are two areas that have attracted substantial research and industry interests
in recent years. On the one hand, the Web services technology is gaining popularity because of its well-defined infrastructure
aiming at enabling interoperability among heterogenous applications. On the other hand, the agent technology aims at providing
intelligent autonomous capabilities for distributed components. A combination of these two technologies could create an environment
where Web services and agents can employ and compliment each others’ strengths. In this chapter, we propose a framework called
WS2JADE for integrating Web services and the JADE agent platform. In particular, the technical aspects of run-time deployment
and control of Web services as agent services with WS2JADE are presented. We relate our framework to other solutions in the
area and show how new emerging Web services management technologies can be used with WS2JADE for enabling Web services management
with agents. The management capabilities are demonstrated with simple examples of using WS2JADE for service discovery, composition
and deployment with JADE agents.
The paper presents a prototype of Fuzzy e-Negotiation Agents (FeNAs) for autonomous multi-issue negotiation in e-commerce.
It considers negotiation as a form of distributed decision making in the presence of limited common knowledge and imprecise/soft
constraints that can be modeled as a distributed fuzzy constraint satisfaction problem (DFCSP). FeNAs incorporate the principles
of utility theory within DFCSPs and use fuzzy constraint-based reasoning in order to find a consensus that maximizes the agent's
utility and the level of its fuzzy constraint satisfaction subject to its acceptability by other agents. The paper presents
aspects of problem representation and negotiation mechanisms used by FeNAs in the context of DFCSPs. An overview of FeNAs
is provided and some capabilities for automated multi-issue negotiation are illustrated with two scenarios of e-commerce trading.
Scalable management and scheduling of dynamic grid resources requires new technologies to build the next generation intelligent grid environments. This work demonstrates that AI techniques can be utilised to achieve effective workload and resource management. A combination of intelligent agents and multi-agent approaches is applied to both local grid resource scheduling and global grid load balancing. Each agent is a representative of a local grid resource and utilises predictive application performance data with iterative heuristic algorithms to engineer local load balancing across multiple hosts. At a higher level, agents cooperate with each other to balance workload using a peer-to-peer service advertisement and discovery mechanism.
Web and grid services are quickly maturing as a technology that allows for the integration of applications belonging to different administrative domains, enabling much faster and more efficient business-to-business arrangements. For such an integration to be effective, the provider and the consumer of a service must negotiate a service level agreement (SLA), i.e. a contract that specifies what one party can expect from the other. But, since SLAs are just contracts, auditing is key to assure that they hold. However, auditing can be very challenging when the parties do not blindly trust each other, which is expected to be the common case for large grid deployments. We here evaluate six architectures that perform SLA auditing both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative evaluation focuses on the performance penalty that auditing introduces. The qualitative evaluation compares the architectures based on aspects such as intrusiveness, trust, use of extra requests, possibility of preferential treatment, possibility of auditing consumer load, and possibility of auditing encrypted messages. We conclude that no single architecture seems to be the best solution for all cases and indicate where each one is best suited.
We present a formal model of negotiation between autonomous agents. The purpose of the negotiation is to reach an agreement about the provision of a service by one agent for another. The model de nes a range of strategies and tactics that agents can employ to generate initial o ers, evaluate proposals and o er counter proposals. The model is based on computationally tractable assumptions, demonstrated in the domain of business process management and empirically evaluated. Keywords: Multi-agent systems, Negotiation, Business Process Management 1
Increasingly, Internet services are being deployed over an infrastructure that spans multiple control domains. These services require cooperation between multiple organizations, systems and entities. Currently, few standard mechanisms exist to share selective management information between the various service providers or between service providers and their customers. Such mechanisms are necessary for end-to-end service management and diagnosis as well as for ensuring the service level obligations between a service provider and its customers or partners. This paper describes an architecture that uses contracts based on service level agreements (SLAs) to share selective management information across administrative boundaries. The design of a prototype implementation for automatically measuring, monitoring, and verifying service level agreements for Internet services is also described.
This paper reports innovative research aiming at supporting autonomous establishment and maintenance of service level agreements in order to guarantee end-to-end quality of service requirements for service composition provision. In this research, a set of interrelated service level agreements is established and maintained for a service composition, through autonomous agent negotiation. To enable this, an innovative framework is proposed in which agents on behalf of the service requestor and the service providers can negotiate service level agreements in a coordinated way. This framework also enables adaptive service level agreement re-negotiation in the dynamic and ever-changing service environment
We present a novel approach of using CIM for the SLA-driven management of distributed systems and discuss our implementation experiences. Supported by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short term business relationships across different service provider boundaries. Such dynamic structures will only be successful if the obligations of different providers with respect to the quality of the offered services can be unambiguously specified and enforced by means of dynamic Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In other words, the management of SLAs needs to become as dynamic as the underlying infrastructure for which they are defined. Our previous work has shown that Web Services, as a typical example for a service-oriented architecture, can be extended in a straightforward way for defining and monitoring SLAs. However, SLAs defined for a Web Services environment need to take into account the underlying managed resources whose management interfaces are defined based on traditional management architectures, such as SNMP-based management or the Common Information Model (CIM). As a solution to this problem, the approach presented in this paper addresses the integration problem of how to transform a Web Services SLA so that it can be understood and enforced by a service provider whose management system is based on a traditional management architecture, such as CIM.
We present a novel approach of using CIM for the SLA-driven management of distributed systems and discuss our implementation experiences. Supported by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short term business relationships across different service provider boundaries. Such dynamic structures will only be successful if the obligations of different providers with respect to the quality of the offered services can be unambiguously specified and enforced by means of dynamic Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In other words, the management of SLAs needs to become as dynamic as the underlying infrastructure for which they are defined.
Our previous work has shown that Web Services, as a typical example for a service-oriented architecture, can be extended in a straightforward way for defining and monitoring SLAs. However, SLAs defined for a Web Services environment need to take into account the underlying managed resources whose management interfaces are defined based on traditional management architectures, such as SNMP-based management or the Common Information Model (CIM). As a solution to this problem, the approach presented in this paper addresses the integration problem of how to transform a Web Services SLA so that it can be understood and enforced by a service provider whose management system is based on a traditional management architecture, such as CIM.
A fundamental problem in distributed computing is to map activities such as computation or data transfer onto resources that meet requirements for performance, cost, security, or other quality of service metrics. The creation of such mappings requires negotiation among application and resources to discover, reserve, acquire, configure, and monitor resources. Current resource management approaches tend to specialize for specific resource classes, and address coordination across resources only in a limited fashion. We present a new approach that overcomes these difficulties.We define a resource management model that distinguishes three kinds of resource-independent service level agreements (SLAs), formalizingag reements to deliver capability, perform activities, and bind activities to capabilities, respectively. We also define a Service
Negotiation and Acquisition Protocol (SNAP) that supports reliable management of remote SLAs. Finally, we explain how SNAP can be deployed within the context of the Globus Toolkit.
Preferences for world states captured by utility function .Toss fair coin: receive 20 if heads, lose 10 if tails U(heads) = 20 U(tails) = -10 Expected utility of action .combine utility with outcome probabilities .EU(take-bet) = (0.5 x 20) + (0.5 x-10) = 5 .EU(not-take-bet) = 0 11 Multiple Attribute Negotiation .assume mutual preference independence between attributes: U(car) = U(make) + U(colour) + U(year) + .... 12 II. Auction-Based Negotiation III. One-to-One Negotiation IV. Argumentation & Persuasion 13 Auction-Based Models Used throughout history .In Babylon in about 500BC, annual auctions of women for marriage! Efficient for 1:many and many-to-many negotiations .quickly find partner with highest valuation variants (25 million!) 14 The Trading Agents Competition Each game comprises 8 competing agents (competition entrants) Each agent: .tries to maximise its score .assembles travel packages for 8 customers from 28 flight, hotel and entertainment auct
In the last few years we have witnessed a surge of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce operated on the Internet. However, most current electronic commerce systems are little more than electronic catalogues that allow a user to purchase a product under predetermined and inflexible terms and conditions. We believe that in the next few years we will see a new generation of electronic commerce systems emerge, based on automated negotiation. In this paper, we identify the main parameters on which any automated negotiation depends. To show the applicability of our classification framework, we use it to categorise a representative sample of some of the most prominent negotiation models that exist in the literature.
Automated intelligent agents inhabiting a shared environment must coordinate their activities. Cooperation -- not merely coordination -- may improve the performance of the individual agents or the overall behavior of the system they form. Research in Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) addresses the problem of designing automated intelligent systems which interact effectively. DAI is not the only field to take on the challenge of understanding cooperation and coordination. There are a variety of other multi-entity environments in which the entities coordinate their activity and cooperate. Among them are groups of people, animals, particles, and computers. We argue that in order to address the challenge of building coordinated and collaborated intelligent agents, it is beneficial to combine AI techniques with methods and techniques from a range of multi-entity fields, such as game theory, operations research, physics and philosophy. To support this claim, we describe so...
Building automated negotiators, agent technologies, infrastructures, tools, and applications for e-services
- N R Jennings
N.R. Jennings, Building automated negotiators, agent technologies,
infrastructures, tools, and applications for e-services, in: NODe 2002
Agent-Related Workshops, Erfurt, Germany, October 2002, p. 19.
ASAPM Requirement Analysis and Architecture
- J Yan
- J Zhang
- J Lin
J. Yan, J. Zhang, J. Lin, ASAPM Requirement Analysis and Architecture,
Technical report ASAPM-TR2005.01, Swinburne University of Technology, January 2005.
SNAP: A protocol for negotiating service level agreements and coordinated resource management in distributed systems
- K Czajkowski
- I Foster
- C Kesselman
- V Sander
- S Trecke
K. Czajkowski, I. Foster, C. Kesselman, V. Sander, S. Trecke, SNAP:
A protocol for negotiating service level agreements and coordinated
resource management in distributed systems, in: Proc. of the 8th
Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing,
Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2002.
Towards automated SLA management for web services
- A Sahai
- A Durante
- V Mchiraju
A. Sahai, A. Durante, V. Mchiraju, Towards automated
SLA management for web services, HP Technical Report,
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-310R1.pdf.
Towards autonomous service level agreement negotiation for adaptive service composition
- J Yan
- J Zhang
- J Lin
- M Chhetri
- S Goh
- R Lowalczyk
J. Yan, J. Zhang, J. Lin, M. Chhetri, S. Goh, R. Lowalczyk, Towards
autonomous service level agreement negotiation for adaptive service
composition, in: Proc. of the 10th International Conference on CSCW in
Design, CSCWD2006, Nanjing, China, 3-5 May, 2006.
Her research interests include data modelling and analysis multi-attribute, multi-lateral, multi-stage negotiation in dynamic and distributed environment composition, fuzzy expert systems and fuzzy logic applications, graph theory and networks optimization
Her research interests include data modelling and analysis multi-attribute, multi-lateral, multi-stage negotiation in dynamic and distributed environment composition, fuzzy expert systems and fuzzy logic applications, graph theory and networks optimization. Jianying received Ph.D. in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Melbourne,
Australia in 2005.
His research interests include Grid and Web Services, Agent Technology and network security
Jian Lin is currently Research Assistant in the Faculty of Information &
Communication Technologies (ICT), Swinburne University of Technology,
Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Centre for Intelligent Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems (CIAMAS). His research interests include Grid and Web
Services, Agent Technology and network security. Jian Lin received Master of
Information Technology degree from Swinburne University of Technology in
2004.
He is a member of the Centre for Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (CIAMAS)
- B Mohan
Mohan B. Chhetri is currently a R&D Software Engineer in the Faculty of
Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), Swinburne University of
Technology. He is a member of the Centre for Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (CIAMAS). Before that, he worked at Monash University
as a Research Programmer for 1.5 years. Previously he did his Masters in
Information Technology at Monash University completing it in October, 2003.