A Logic Based SLA Management Framework
Adrian Paschke, Jens B. Dietrich, K. Kuhla · 2005
Abstract. Management, execution and maintenance of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in the upcoming service oriented IT landscape need new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. In this paper we evolve a rule based approach to SLA representation and management which allows a clean separation of concerns, i.e. the contractual business logic are separated from the application logic. We make use of sophisticated, logic based knowledge representation (KR) concepts and combine adequate logical formalisms in one expressive logic based framework called ContractLog. ContractLog underpins a declarative rule based SLA (RBSLA) language with which to describe SLAs in a generic way as machine readable and executable contract specifications. Based on ContractLog and the RBSLA we have implemented a high level architecture for the automation of electronic contracts- a rule-based Service Level Management tool (RBSLM) capable of maintaining, monitoring and managing large amounts of complex contract rules. 1 Why declarative rule-based SLA representation? Our studies of a vast number of SLAs currently used throughout the industry have revealed that today’s prevailing contracts are plain natural language documents. Consequently,