Employing Intelligent Agents to Automate SLA Creation

Abstract

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are commonly prepared and signed agreements that form the contracts between a service provider and its customers, defining the obligations and liabilities of the parties. Naturally, SLAs should reflect the business needs of both customer and supplier. SLAs are usually formed through either the adoption of a boilerplate agreement from the provider, or through a mediation/negotiation process between the parties. With the increasing adoption of software supply being implemented as a network service, such schemes are rigid or slow and costly, This paper proposes a system that the parties can use to facilitate both fast and flexible agreements. It proposes automation of SLA creation from a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), making use of software agents and adopting a social order function by incorporating it into the decision process.