Transforming floundering into success

We show how logic programs with "delays" can be transformed to programs without delays in a way which preserves information concerning floundering (also known as deadlock). This allows a declarative (model-theoretic), bottom-up or goal independent approach to be used for analysis and debugging of properties related to floundering. We rely on some previously introduced restrictions on delay primitives and a key observation which allows properties such as groundness to be analysed by approximating the (ground) success set. This paper is to appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP). Keywords: Floundering, delays, coroutining, program analysis, abstract interpretation, program transformation, declarative debuggingComment: Number of pages: 24 Number of figures: 9 Number of tables: non

Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute 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. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS), submitted 19th March 200