Modeling service level agreements with binary decision diagrams

Abstract

The vision of automated service composition for enabling service economies is challenged by many theoretical and technical limitations of current technologies. There is a need for complete, dependable service hierarchies created on-the-fly for critical business environments. Such automatically- constructed, complex and dynamic service hierarchies imply a similarly automated process for establishing the contracts that specify the rules governing the consumption of services; and for binding them into respective contract hierarchies. Deducing these required contracts is a computationally challenging task. This also applies to the optimization of such contract sets to maximize utility. We propose the application of (Shared) Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams, a suitable graph-based data structure well-known in the area of Electronic Design Automation. These diagrams can be used as a canonical representation of SLAs, thus allowing their efficient and unambiguous management independent of their structure's specifics. As such, this representation can facilitate the process of negotiating SLAs, subcontracting parts of them, optimizing their utility, and managing them during runtime for monitoring and enforcement. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.