Towards Compensable SLAs

Abstract

In Cooperative Information Systems, service level agreements (SLA) can be used to describe the rights and obligations of parties involved in the transaction (typically the service consumer and the service provider); amongst other information, SLA could define guarantees associated with the idea of service level objectives (SLOs) that normally represent key performance indicators of either the consumer or the provider. in case the guarantee is under-fulfilled or over-fulfilled SLAs could also define some compensations (i.e. penalties or rewards). in such a context, during the last years there have been important steps towards the automation of the management of SLAs, however the formalization of compensations in SLAs still remains as an important challenge. in this paper we aim to provide a characterization model to create SLAs with compensations; specifically, the main contributions are twofold: (i) the conceptualization of the Compensation Function to express consistently penalties and rewards and (ii) a model for Compensable Guarantees that associate SLOs with Compensation Functions. This formalization models aims to establish a foundation to elaborate tools that could provide an automated support to the modeling and analysis of SLAs with compensations. Additionally, in order to validate our approach, we model and analyze a set of guarantee terms from three real world examples of SLAs and our formalization proves to be useful for detecting mistakes that are typ