Extending WS-agreement to support automated conformity check on transport and logistics service agreements

Abstract

Checking whether the agreed service quality attributes are fulfilled or maintained during the service life-cycle is a very important task for SLA (Service Level Agreement) enforcement. In this paper, we leverage conformance checking techniques developed for computational services to automate the conformity checking of transport & logistics services. Our solution extends the WS-Agreement metamodel to support the definition of frame and specific SLAs. With this extension, we define a new validation operation for the conformity check of transport & logistics SLAs based on CSPs solvers. The key contribution of our work is that, as far as we know, it is the first definition of an automated conformity check solution for long term agreements in the transport & logistics domain. Nonetheless, other domains in which similar SLAs are defined can also benefit from our solution. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.