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.
