13 de Julio de 2018

• Autor: Gutiérrez Fernández, Antonio Manuel.
• Titulo: “Sla Management Of Non-Computational Services”
• Departamento: Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos.
• Teseo: https://www.educacion.gob.es/teseo/mostrarRef.do?ref=1719057
• Directores: Antonio Ruiz Cortés y Manuel Resinas Arias De Reyna (Tutor/Ponente).
• Sinopsis:

  The rise of computational services in the last decade has promoted a number of tech- niques to automate and support their enactment. A crucial element in service engineering is the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is used as a mechanism to define guaran- tees on the performance levels of the service provided. Furthermore, it usually specifies penalties or rewards in case the service levels are not achieved or overachieved, respec- tively. In the context of SLAs, the proposals from computational domains are mainly oriented to automate different tasks in their Lifecycle, such as the negotiation of terms which will form the SLA, the enactment of services based on the SLA terms or the man- agement of computational resources to accomplish SLA goals at runtime.

  However, non-computational services, that is, services which are mainly based on business processes and are not performed by computational resources alone, such as logistics or software development services, are still supported by ad-hoc mechanisms. Therefore, the existing solutions for the management of their SLAs cannot be reused for other services. Moreover, this management is usually manually performed (e.g.: review- ing of the goals of an SLA in transport service), so their evaluation is error-prone and de- layed regarding the service execution (e.g.: it is performed when the SLA is finished), so preemptive actions to avoid SLA violations cannot be taken or are expensive to perform. Furthermore, in non-computational services, new SLA validation challenges appear as these SLAs are sometimes described in the context of a more general frame agreement that predefines several aspects of the SLA. This is common in logistics scenarios where a frame agreement with general conditions about transports is defined for a certain period of time and specific SLAs within the context of the frame agreement are created for each transport.

  This dissertation is aimed at partially automating this management of SLAs in non- computational services based on the hypothesis that existing SLA models for computa- tional services can be extended to non computational services and enable the description of the service operative and their guarantees. The contributions of this dissertation are three. First, providing a model to describe Service Level Agreements of non computational services, as an extension of iAgree, an existing model for SLAs of computational services. Second, providing a design for oper- ations to partially automate the SLA lifecycle. And, lastly, providing a model for frame and specific agreements which relates their terms and formalises the analysis operations among them.

  The current dissertation has been based on real SLAs from different domains, such as Transport & Logistics, public Cloud providers or IT Maintenance outsourcing, which have been used to validate the proposal. Furthermore, the contributions have been ap- plied in the context of real IT Maintenance outsourcing projects.