Rule-based Knowledge Representation for Service Level Agreement

Doctoral Symposium of MATES'06 Abstract: Automated management and monitoring of service contracts like Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or higher-level policies is vital for efficient and reliable distributed se rvice-oriented architectures (SOA) with high quality of service (QoS) levels. IT service provider need to manage, exec ute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. I propose a novel rule-based knowledge representation (KR) for SLA rules and a respective rule-based service level management (RBSLM) framework. My rule-based approach based on logic programming pr ovides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation and high levels of automation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. Therewith, I address an urgent need service-oriented businesses do have nowadays which is to dynamically change their business and contractual logic in order to adapt to rapidly changing business environments and to overcome the restricting nature of slow change cycles.