TOWARDS DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT IN SERVICE COMPOSITIONS

Abstract: Business services are a valuable asset to be traded on internet service marketplaces. While they are offered via the internet their execution often involves manual steps. The provisioning of services is regulated by service level agreements (SLA). The composition of business services enables the creation of innovative business processes which can be offered as services again. Selling these service compositions brings along challenges for handling two important tasks, namely the monitoring of SLA violations and SLA renegotiation. Both tasks are challenging because they affect not only a single service but multiple stakeholders of the composition. In this paper we discuss the problem of dependencies between services in compositions based on a scenario from the logistics domain. Dependencies between services are problematic because they lead to situations where the SLA violation of one service affects the provisioning of other services. Similarly, the renegotiation of the SLA of one service has effects on the SLAs of other services. We present a conceptual architecture and an approach towards a solution for handling service dependencies. a aThe project was funded by means of the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology under the promotional reference “01MQ07012”. The authors take the responsibility for the contents.