CONFERENCES

Paul Karaenke and Stefan Kirn, "Service Level Agreements: Evaluation from a Business Application Perspective", Proceedings of eChallenges 2007.

The vision of a worldwide computing grid evokes the scenario of electronic markets for grid services. For such a market, explicit formal statements of both obligations and guarantees regarding grid services in a business relationship are needed; these are referred to as service level agreements (SLAs). The objects of our investigation are current specifications and standards for SLAs. We address the problem that these approaches do not sufficiently fulfil requirements of business transactions, because they have been designed for other, technical objectives. We evaluate the most relevant SLA specifications and standards from an e-business transaction perspective, clarifying how they currently cover business transactions on e-markets, in particular which activities within market transactions they support. We assess the current state of SLA approaches and reveal room for possible enhancements.

Thomas Bieser and Stefan Kirn, "Towards a Decision Framework on the Use of Multiagent Systems in OGSA Compliant Grid Middleware", Proceedings of eChallenges 2007.

Implementing and using Grids requires a suitable Grid middleware. A ref- erence model for the architecture of Grid middleware is the Open Grid Service Ar- chitecture (OGSA) which proposes a service-oriented architecture based on Web ser- vice technologies. As a consequence, the potential of such OGSA compliant Grid middleware is limited by the capabilities of Web service technologies. Recently, multiagent concepts and technologies have been proposed to overcoming these limi- tations. While this suggestion was widely accepted by both the multiagent and Grid community and has already resulted in a wide spectrum of respective research and development, there is still no comprehensive decision support available on how and where to use multiagent technology in OGSA compliant Grid middleware. The engi- neering of Grid middleware could benefit from such a support. Therefore, this paper aims at a first attempt towards a framework to support the engineering of OGSA compliant Grid middleware using multiagent technology.

Bastian Koller, Lutz Schubert, Hai-Ninh Quyen, Henning Mersch, Philipp Wieder, Peer Hasselmeyer, "Implementing an SLA Negotiation Framework", Proceedings of eChallenges 2007.

Despite promising high value for electronic business, Service Level Agreements have not yet found major uptake in the business world. A major obstacle to adoption is the lack of adequate tools that facilitate and automate SLA establishment on both the consumer as well as the provider side. In this paper, we describe a generic framework for negotiating SLAs that has been designed and implemented by the authors. The components automate large parts of the negotiation process while at the same time letting the user retain control. An application scenario has been realised using our framework showing that the negotiation and establishment of SLAs is a viable solution for electronic contracting and that our framework can facilitate this task.

Lutz Schubert, Stefan Wesner, Bastian Koller, Alexander Kipp, "Privacy Issues in eContracts – a Hierarchical Model", Proceedings of eChallenges 2007.

Modern day approaches towards realising Service Level Agreement (SLA) specifications generally disrespect essential privacy and confidentiality issues, in particular with respect to exposing information about the infrastructure and how quality related data is gathered and processed. Such information is neither helpful for the customer, nor does it agree with most providers’ confidentiality policies. This paper will present a hierarchical approach towards modelling SLAs that would allow any degree of confidentiality & privacy meeting both customer’s and provider’s requirements. It would also allow the provider to easily reuse the SLA for different infrastructure setups. Such an approach will make it possible to close the gap between SLA capabilities and the requirements of (electronic) contracts.

Bastian Koller, Peer Hasselmeyer, Ioannis Kotsiopoulos, Dean Kuo, Michael Parkin, "Negotiating SLAs with Dynamic Pricing Policies", Proceedings of the SOC@Inside'07.

This position paper argues for research in the development of focused solutions for dynamic pricing, service-level agreements and negotiation for eServices in a digital economy. Thereby the authors have a main focus on the development of an independent negotiation protocol, which satisfies the needs and preferences of customers and service providers, also with a certain focus on legal aspects of such a protocol. Another point of interest is hereby to examine what properties dynamic pricing components in a service oriented architecture should have and which benefits can be reached by following such approaches. We see that the provisioning of dynamic pricing components will surely affect the negotiation behavior of service providers and customers in a way that eBusiness will get stronger.

Lutz Schubert, Alexander Kipp. Bastian Koller, "Supporting Collaborative Engineering Using an Intelligent Web Service Middleware", Proceedings of the CE2007 Conference, published by Springer London.

Collaborative Engineering tasks are difficult to manage and involve a high amount of risk – as such, these tasks generally involve only well-known pre-established relationships. Such collaborations are generally quite static and do not allow for dynamic reactions to changes in the environment. Furthermore, not all optimal resource providers can be utilised for the respective tasks as they are potentially unknown. The TrustCoM project elaborated the means to create and manage Virtual Organisations in a trusted and secure manner integrating different providers on demand. However, TrustCoM focused more on the VO than on the participant, whereas the BREIN project is now enhancing the intelligence of such VO systems to support even providers with little business expertise and provide them with capabilities to optimise their performance. This paper analyses the capabilities of current VO frameworks on the example of TrustCoM and identifies the gaps from the participant’s perspective. It then shows how BREIN addresses these gaps.