COSMA

In this book, the composite service level agreement management approach (COSMA) for management of service level agreements (SLA) involved in composite services during their entire lifecycle is presented. The central idea behind the COSMA approach is the integration of all SLAs a composite service provider has to deal with into one composite SLA management document. This document contains the contractual data of all involved SLAs and in addition the relationships and dependencies that exist between different aspects of atomic and composite SLAs. On this basis, the contribution of atomic SLA contents to composite SLA contents can be expressed and used in optimizing the SLA lifecycle management, i. e. for negotiating, monitoring, and evaluating SLAs. The book is separated into three parts. Part I provides the general background and discusses and defines terms that are relevant for the context of this book. It discusses the service orientation paradigm and an application of the paradigm in service markets. It introduces the concept of service level agreements, their elements and structure, and their lifecycle management. It presents a requirements analysis on composite SLA management and discusses current efforts in the area of SLAs in service-oriented computing environments in brief. Afterwards, it evaluates them against the identified requirements. Part II presents the conceptual model of the COSMA approach, describes the general idea and main benefits of COSMA and lists general assumptions of the approach. It presents the constitutional elements of COSMA, the conceptual framework COSMAframe, the generic information model COSMAdoc, and an integrated set of composite SLA management practices which are defined as COSMAlife, in detail. Part III provides a validation of the COSMA approach. It provides a sample use case for the application of COSMA and presents a prototypical implementation which was developed in conjunction to the conceptual model of COSMA. Readers of this book will get a broad overview and a deep insight at the same time on latest research results in the area of composite SLA lifecycle management and their potential application in future business models.