On the Automated Analysis of WS-Agreement Documents. Applications to the Processes of Creating and Monitoring Agreements

TitleOn the Automated Analysis of WS-Agreement Documents. Applications to the Processes of Creating and Monitoring Agreements
Publication TypePhd Thesis
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsMüller, Carlos
Thesis DirectorRuiz-Cortés, Antonio
SchoolUniversidad de Sevilla
Thesis TypeInternational dissertation
Abstract

The need for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to supervise the services consumption is increasing in business applications and Cloud scenarios due to the violation of SLA terms may carry penalties to the parties. Such a need for SLAs boosts the importance and complexity of SLA lifecycle supporting systems, SLA-driven solutions from now on. After a study of the existing literature we conclude that these SLA-driven solutions can be significantly enhanced in both: (1) the SLA specification languages, and (2) the techniques to extract useful information from the SLAs, analysis techniques, in advance. In the one hand, we suggest that existing SLA specification languages can be improved by turning them into: i) domain-independent, ii) standard-recommendation-compliant, and iii) expressive-enough to ease the description of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), constraints, and validity periods for their comprised elements. In addition, the specification languages must define validity criteria for checking that supported SLAs satisfy some basic properties such as the consistency, and the compliance between SLA documents.
Furthermore, explanations must be provided when the SLAs do not satisfy such basic properties. On the other hand, the proposed analysis techniques include some drawbacks that can be found in emerging techniques. To overcome such drawbacks there must be developed: a) fully-functional reference implementations, b) techniques with a reuse-oriented design, c) effective extension mechanisms, and d) user-friendly interfaces.

The main goal of this dissertation is to improve the current support to develop SLA-driven solutions by adopting the WS-Agreement standard recommendation and considering the aforementioned suggestions for improvement.

The main thesis contributions are a WS-Agreement-compliant language called iAgree, and an Integrated Development Environment for slA-driven Solutions (IDEAS) whose main component is an iAgree Document Analyser (ADA). As minor contributions, two solutions have been developed to improve the existing tooling support to create and monitor SLAs.

The cornerstone of our proposal to improve the SLA specification languages has been the definition of the WS-Agreement Configurations that comprise the sublanguages needed to describe the different parts of WS--Agreement documents. Regarding our proposal to improve the analysis techniques, the key has been the organization of such techniques in a catalogue of basic analysis operations that can be combined to support more advanced SLA-driven solutions. The applicability of our results is limited to those SLAs that can be translated to a constraint satisfaction problem, that is enough to support real-world SLAs, in our experience.

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