Using automated analysis of temporal-aware SLAs in logistics

Abstract

Service level agreements (SLAs) establish the terms in which a logistics service may be provided or consumed. During the last years we have been studying techniques to perform an automated analysis of expressive and realistic SLAs, which makes the agreement creation process easier for involved parties. Firstly, we extended WS-Agreement specification to allow to apply any type of validity periods to SLA terms. Later, we dealt with the automated analysis of SLAs by proposing the explaining of SLAs inconsistencies and non-compliance scenarios. In this paper we show how these contributions are necessary to enable a logistic scenario of package tracking by providing examples for each proposal. We also include a final discussion on the convenience of performing a merge of all contributions to enable a better application of SLAs to logistic scenarios. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.