Temporal-Awareness in SLAS. Why Should We Be Concerned?

Abstract

Traditionally, Service Level Agreements have been decomposed in two sets of properties: functionals (what) and non-functionals (how). However, in our opinion, there has been a third key element that has had a minor attention from academy: temporal awareness (when). We believe temporality is a main concern that should be addressed in realistic scenarios. in doing so, this position paper discuss our experience in extending the specification WS-Agreement with a temporal Domain Specific Language; importantly, main aim of the paper is to provoke a debate about the importance of temporality in SLAs.