Service Contract Automation

Abstract

Today’s transition from a product- to a service-oriented economy implies fundamental technical, organizational and economic challenges. The trend of compensating missing core competencies by requesting business services from external providers to be integrated in internal end-to-end processes has recently gained tremendous momentum. Nevertheless, service level agreements between the parties involved are still specified for each service entity that is part of composite business services which results in a managerial overhead generated from multiple contractual relations. The contribution of this paper is threefold: (i) We analyze the fundamental requirements in the context of describing services, quality and agreements as well as their aggregation in a generic manner. Based on the results, we (ii) provide a holistic framework that enables the automation of service contracts for composite business services. Facilitating semantic technologies we provide means for describing service quality from a technical and business-oriented perspective, adequate metrics as well as quality aggregation operations in the context of composite business services. Furthermore, we (iii) evaluate our framework based on an industrial application scenario