Uncertainty in service provisioning relationships

Web services encapsulate some well-defined functionality such as data storage, computation or a business process. An organization can delegate responsibility for the provision of a Web service to another organization with the formation of a Service Provisioning Relationship (SPR). Such relationships enable organizations to specialize in the provision of those Web services for which they have a comparative advantage, and to outsource responsibility for any other functionality on which they are dependent to the Web services provided by other organizations. This specialization can lead to significant increases in organizational efficiency. The scale of such increases is determined by the extent to which the presence of uncertainty in the Quality of Service (QoS) can be addressed by the organizations in the SPR. The requester of a Web service can be uncertain of the willingness and ability of the provider to provision a Web service with a certain QoS. The provider of a Web service can be uncertain of his ability to provision a Web service to each requester with a certain QoS. These uncertainties can endanger the economic viability of such relationships, and mitigate any increases in organizational efficiency. This thesis provides a number of key contributions to address these uncertainties in order to retain the economic viability of these relationships for both organizations. The key contributions are: an institutional framework for trust in SPRs, a structured language for the representation of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) as a contingent contract, and a theoretical and practical methodology for the creation of SLAs which are optimal with regard to the objectives of an organization.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEPSRCGBUnited Kingdo

An approach for quality of service adaptation in service-oriented Grids

Some applications utilizing Grid computing infrastructure require the simultaneous allocation of resources, such as compute servers, networks, memory, disk storage and other specialized resources. Collaborative working and visualization is one example of such applications. In this context, quality of service (QoS) is related to Grid services, and not just to the network connecting these services. With the emerging interest in service-oriented Grids, resources may be advertised and traded as services based on a service level agreement (SLA). Such a SLA must include both general and technical specifications, including pricing policy and properties of the resources required to execute the service, to ensure QoS requirements are satisfied. An approach for QoS adaptation is presented to enable the dynamic adjustment of behavior of an application based on changes in the pre-defined SLA. The approach is particularly useful if workload or network traffic changes in unpredictable ways during an active sessio

An approach for quality of service adaptation in service-oriented Grids

Some applications utilizing Grid computing infrastructure require the simultaneous allocation of resources, such as compute servers, networks, memory, disk storage and other specialized resources. Collaborative working and visualization is one example of such applications. In this context, quality of service (QoS) is related to Grid services, and not just to the network connecting these services. With the emerging interest in service-oriented Grids, resources may be advertised and traded as services based on a service level agreement (SLA). Such a SLA must include both general and technical specifications, including pricing policy and properties of the resources required to execute the service, to ensure QoS requirements are satisfied. An approach for QoS adaptation is presented to enable the dynamic adjustment of behavior of an application based on changes in the pre-defined SLA. The approach is particularly useful if workload or network traffic changes in unpredictable ways during an active sessio