Service Level Agreements in BREIN

Abstract

With electronic business (eBusiness) becoming ubiquitous, the traditional ways of doing business need to be changed or completely replaced to sup- port the end users e ectively. This concerns especially the representation of business relationships with an electronic format to allow for automated processing of the respective parts of e.g. contractual obligations. One prominent representation tool, especially for Quality of Service parame- ters, is the concept of Service Level Agreements. Conceptually established as paper representation to describe parts of contracts of telecom operators, SLAs have become a research topic in the ICT domain now for several years. However, the current state-of-the-art in Service Level Agreements and their management, still shows several de cits, which prevented the up- take of eBusiness solutions (based on Service Level Agreements) so far. This paper will present how the BREIN project enhanced, amongst others Service Level Agreement Management with capabilities from the Multi- agent and Semantic domain, to provide an enhanced solution, compared to existing technologies. To this end, the focus was on basing the devel- opments on existing results to allow for concentration on gaps instead of re-inventing everything from scratch.