Establishment Of Service Level Agreements Research Articles

Empirical analysis of factors affecting industrial maintenance services selection

The process of selecting industrial maintenance services needs careful consideration of various factors to ensure that the chosen provider can effectively meet the specific needs of the organization/facility. This research paper examines the key factors that play a significant role in the decision-making process for selecting industrial maintenance services. These factors encompass the nature of services required, the expertise and experience of the service provider, cost and budget constraints, availability and responsiveness, establishment of service level agreements, evaluation of reputation and references, compliance with safety regulations, assessment of technological capabilities, flexibility and scalability of services, and sustainability practices. Through a thorough examination of these factors, industrial facilities can make well-informed decisions that align with their unique requirements and priorities.

Efficient Resource Utilization in IoT and Cloud Computing

With the proliferation of IoT devices, there has been exponential growth in data generation, placing substantial demands on both cloud computing (CC) and internet infrastructure. CC, renowned for its scalability and virtual resource provisioning, is of paramount importance in e-commerce applications. However, the dynamic nature of IoT and cloud services introduces unique challenges, notably in the establishment of service-level agreements (SLAs) and the continuous monitoring of compliance. This paper presents a versatile framework for the adaptation of e-commerce applications to IoT and CC environments. It introduces a comprehensive set of metrics designed to support SLAs by enabling periodic resource assessments, ensuring alignment with service-level objectives (SLOs). This policy-driven approach seeks to automate resource management in the era of CC, thereby reducing the dependency on extensive human intervention in e-commerce applications. This paper culminates with a case study that demonstrates the practical utilization of metrics and policies in the management of cloud resources. Furthermore, it provides valuable insights into the resource requisites for deploying e-commerce applications within the realms of the IoT and CC. This holistic approach holds the potential to streamline the monitoring and administration of CC services, ultimately enhancing their efficiency and reliability.

Rekayasa Informasi Untuk Mendukung Keberlangsungan Proses Service Level Management

The main component of the entire strategy in Service Level Management (SLM) as a service provider is shown by implementing the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The service provider has to always guarantee that SLA which is indeed determined for a customer is achieved and fulfilled. The thing causing a failure in fulfilment of SLA is the expectation of business that is categorized in high indication while SLA establishment is still in progress, so it is indicated that there is a difference of perception between business and IT paradigm. The aim of this study is to build a framework to facilitate the achievement of a balance between the expected quality for the customer as the receiver party and the service which is offered by a service provider. The methodology which is applied in this study is by using an approach of informationengineering that consists of planning the analysis of related vision, planning of the technology effect, analysis of critical success factor, analysis of problem and purpose, as well as the identification of business area. The research which is conducted has given an obvious perspective paradigm in general that an integrated information system is indeed needed into the implementation of SLM to complete the significance among the functional divisions in a company

Efficient agent-based negotiation by predicting opponent preferences using AHP

Negotiation is a process essential for a wide range of applications. The complex decision making involved in negotiation makes its automation difficult. The complexity is further increased as negotiators hide their individual preferences from each other to avoid exploitation by the opponent. Even though sharing of private preference information leads to better agreement for both sides, it is never done in the absence of trust. In this work, we learn opponent’s preference information from the offers given by the opponent using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). We apply our approach to the negotiation of Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters for the establishment of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between a provider and a consumer. Experiments show that using AHP, the negotiations are faster and the agreements are on or nearer to the pareto-optimal line.

Efficient agent-based negotiation by predicting opponent preferences using AHP

Negotiation is a process essential for a wide range of applications. The complex decision making involved in negotiation makes its automation difficult. The complexity is further increased as negotiators hide their individual preferences from each other to avoid exploitation by the opponent. Even though sharing of private preference information leads to better agreement for both sides, it is never done in the absence of trust. In this work, we learn opponent’s preference information from the offers given by the opponent using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). We apply our approach to the negotiation of Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters for the establishment of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between a provider and a consumer. Experiments show that using AHP, the negotiations are faster and the agreements are on or nearer to the pareto-optimal line.

An Autonomic SLA Monitoring Framework Managed by Trusted Third Party in the Cloud Computing

This article describes how currently, service level agreements (SLAs) assurance forms one of the major challenges for cloud computing (CC) in order to guarantee quality of service (QoS) in real-time and control SLA violations. However, due to the highly dynamic nature of this open environment, it is important to have a binding agreement between all the service parties for ensuring trust while fulfilling the expected QoS. To properly operate and manage such complex situations, an effective and efficient monitoring is crucial. The participation of a trusted third party (TTP) is necessary in order to resolve conflicts between involved parties. This article proposes an autonomic SLA monitoring framework managed by TTP composed of two modules: the first one SLA establishment module, which aims at providing support for automated SLA generation and management. The second one, a service monitoring module to dynamically monitor QoS metrics by detecting SLA violations at runtime to verify compliances for the respective SLAs, and to propose a mechanism for an adaptive remedy rectification, as a contribution at the third maturity level of the autonomic computing paradigm as defined by IBM. The framework is validated with scenarios on response time and availability, the results obtained are promising. They confirm that this framework manages SLAs in an efficient way as it detects all violations to be communicated to concerned parties, and identifies particular penalty clauses that can be used to modify the reputation of a provider over time. The TTP framework equipped with such reputation module can provide real-time assessment for consumers informed decision making to continue using a service or to migrate to another service provider in the case of service degradation. This creates a fair competitiveness between providers and hence improves service performance and the reliability in the cloud.

Optimized Service Level Agreement Establishment in Cloud Computing

Nowadays, the access to a cloud computing environment is provided on-demand, offering transparent services to clients. Although the cloud allows an abstraction of the behavior of the infrastructure in the service providers (involving logical and physical resources), the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) fulfilment remains a challenge, because depending on the service demand and the system configuration, the providers may not be able to meet the clients requirements. In this way, mechanisms that take account of load balancing and resource provisioning algorithms to provide an efficient load distribution in the available resources are necessary. However, the studies in the literature do not effectively address the problem of the resource provisioning to meet clients requirements using optimization techniques, restricting the analysis to a limited set of objectives. This paper proposes algorithms to address the computational resource provisioning problem using optimization techniques on-the-fly. The techniques optimize the use of the resources available in the cloud infrastructure, aiming to fulfill the clients requirements defined in the SLAs, and ensuring the efficient use of resources.

Monitoring solution in a dynamic Service-Oriented Platform

Quality attributes play a relevant role in Service-Oriented Computing, as they allow distinguishing similar services. These attributes impact on various activities related to the life-cycle of service-based applications (SBAs). The effect starts from service discovery and permeates other activities such as service level agreement establishment and monitoring. Considering the relevance of quality attributes, they must be precisely defined. Moreover, as these attributes are intrinsically dynamic, they must be permanently monitored. This paper proposes a meta-model that formally defines and connects service, quality and event domains. The connection between service and quality domains enables the design of models that specify applications’ functional and non-functional requirements. The connection between quality and event domains allows engineers to define how quality metrics can be computed based on a set of runtime events. Conformant models can be interpreted at runtime by compatible platforms to dynamically configure their monitoring mechanisms.

A combined energy-bandwidth approach to allocate resilient virtual software defined networks

The Internet supports many applications for millions of users every day and will enable the creation of even more innovative services for all participants. However, there is still no Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee for the users. In order to specify requirements, clients establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their Internet Service Providers (ISPs), where resilience and available bandwidth are key requirements for the success of Internet services. On the other hand, the ISPs aim to maximize their profit by establishing as many SLAs as possible and decrease the energy consumption to deliver their services. The mixing of Software Defined Networks (SDNs) and Virtual Networks (VNs), called Virtual Software Defined Network (VSDN), improves the flexibility and manageability of networks, arising it as an option to achieve these goals. Within this context, this paper presents two algorithms to allocate VSDNs: (i) the Bandwidth and Reliability According to Redundancy (BRAR) algorithm to achieve resilience; and (ii) the Bandwidth and Energy Efficiency Focus (BEE-Focus) algorithm to find paths taking into account bandwidth availability and energy efficiency. The results show the benefits of the proposed algorithms in deploying resilient VSDNs regarding energy efficiency, while improving bandwidth availability in the network infrastructure.

Bandwidth-aware allocation of resilient Virtual Software Defined Networks

Currently, it is hard to imagine our lives without the Internet, where services are accessed and shared by billions of users every day. However, even after many years, the Internet cannot guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for the main services to current and future clients. To deal with this problem, clients establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including resilience parameters. The Internet is recognized to be resilient enough for many services, but it is still sensitive to failure events that affect the performance of these services. Software Defined Networks (SDNs) together with Virtual Network (VNs) approaches aim to enhance the management, planning and resource usage of networks. When both approaches are mixed together, we have Virtual Software Defined Network (VSDN). However, the allocation of VSDNs considering resilience issues is still an open issue. Within this context, this paper presents an algorithm for VSDN allocation, called Bw-Risk-Ratio, that considers resilience factors, as well as it deploys the VSDN according to QoS parameters defined in the SLA. Experiments using a real network topology show the effectiveness of the algorithm to deploy the VSDN resilient to failure events when compared to existing solutions.

MDE Approach for the Establishment of a Service Level Agreements Monitoring by Trusted Third Party in the Cloud Computing

Establishing and monitoring SLA violations in real-time has become a critical issue for Cloud Computing. In this paper the authors investigate this issue and propose a model to express the SLA contract requirements using Model Driven Engineering (MDE), as a mean for establishing service level agreements between a cloud provider and cloud customer in the context of a particular service provision. The participation of a Trusted Third Party (TTP) may be necessary in order to resolve conflicts between prospective signatories, likewise to monitor SLA violations in real-time in the goal to ensure online monitoring cloud services and provide better than best-effort behavior for clouds. The main focus of this work is firstly to use MDE technology for the creation of the SLA contract and then to integrate TTP that should be able to apply an advanced penalty model that guarantees the performance and the reliability of the Cloud.

AutoSLAM – A policy‐based framework for automated SLA establishment in cloud environments

SummaryCloud computing offers a realization of SOA in which IT resources are dynamically provisioned as services to consumers using flexible provisioning and pricing models. When provisioning such services, providers and consumers must first agree over the service usage terms and conditions, which are captured in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we propose a policy‐based framework with corresponding models, mechanisms and tools for the automated establishment of SLAs in open, diverse and dynamic cloud environments. The Automated SLA Management framework allows entities to specify their requirements and capabilities, and preferences over them in a flexible and expressive manner. It also supports multiple interaction models for SLA establishment, giving consumers and providers the flexibility to select the one that is most appropriate in a given context, while simultaneously participating in multiple concurrent SLA interactions using different interaction models. As part of the framework, we define a formal model for the underlying policies, a corresponding physical model WS‐SLAM that extends WS‐Policy and a reference architecture that can be easily implemented. We validate the practicability of our framework through the Smart CloudPurchaser prototype that can automatically purchase computing resources from Amazon EC2 under different scenarios and contexts. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dynamic Establishment Of Sla With Automated Negotiation And Privacy Policy For E-Business Application

The Service Level Agreements (SLA) are e- Contracts that need to be established among business partners and monitored to ensure that web services comply with the agreed Quality of Service values. Establishment of SLA among the component services of a composite service and the users becomes important. The establishment is time consuming when done manually because it involves negotiation of parameters to be agreed by the participants. Hence an algorithm is proposed for automated negotiation and a framework for automated contract establishment is designed and implemented. For web services to be successful, privacy must be protected. Today, privacy has become more important concern for both users and web service provider. More people will use web services if they feel all the information released are secure enough. Privacy can often be guaranteed through security measures. To enable privacy protection for Web services, customers are allowed to specify their preferences about the disclosure of their information. In this paper its demonstrated with a suitable e-Business application of Purchase and Registration of Vehicles along with the privacy is ensured during composition of the individual web services for the customer's details.

Establishing composite SLAs through concurrent QoS negotiation with surplus redistribution

SUMMARYThe end‐to‐end QoS negotiation for service level agreement establishment for composite services involves compound multi‐party negotiations in which the composite service provider concurrently negotiates with multiple candidates for each atomic service, selecting the one that best satisfies the atomic service QoS preferences while ensuring that the end‐to‐end QoS requirements are also fulfilled. In order to be able to negotiate with potential candidates, it is necessary to derive the atomic utility boundaries from the global utility boundary. Additionally, there has to be a mechanism for updating these boundaries in subsequent negotiation rounds based on the individual negotiation outcomes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the decomposition of global utility boundary into atomic service utility boundaries, and the surplus redistribution from successful negotiation outcomes among the remaining negotiations. The proposed mechanism is a practical approach to efficiently coordinate concurrent service negotiations within complex workflows, enabling the iterative and interactive adjustment of the negotiation boundaries for each atomic service in a composition based on the performance of other atomic negotiations. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by evaluating it with some popular negotiation strategies using the Specialized Property Search Scenario. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ODACE SLA

The establishment of Service Level Agreements between service providers and clients remains a complex task regarding the uninterrupted growth of the IT market. In fact, it is important to ensure a clear and fair establishment of these SLAs especially when providers and clients do not share the same technical knowledge. To address this problem, the authors started modeling client intentions and provider offers using ontologies. These models helped them in establishing and implementing a complete semantic matching approach containing four main steps. The first step consists of generating correspondences between the client and the provider terms by assigning certainties for their equivalence. The second step corrects and refines these certainties. In the third step, the authors evaluate the matching results using inference rules, and in the fourth step, a draft version of a Service Level Agreement is automatically generated in case of compatibility.

Inter-autonomous system provisioning for end-to-end bandwidth guarantees

This paper addresses the issue of provisioning end-to-end bandwidth guarantees across multiple Autonomous Systems (ASes). We first review a cascaded model for negotiating and establishing service level agreements for end-to-end bandwidth guarantees between ASes. We then present a network dimensioning system that uses traffic engineering mechanisms for the provisioning of end-to-end bandwidth guarantees. The network dimensioning system solves two problems: (1) the economic problem of how to determine the optimum amount of bandwidth that needs to be purchased from adjacent downstream ASes at a minimum total cost; (2) given the available bandwidth resources within and beyond the AS as a result of (1), the engineering problem of how to assign bandwidth guaranteed routes to the predicted traffic while optimizing the network resource utilization. We formulate both as integer-programming problems and prove them to be NP-hard. An efficient genetic algorithm and an efficient greedy-penalty heuristic are, respectively, used to solve the two problems and we show that these perform significantly better than simple heuristic and random approaches.