The Role of Agreements in IT Management Software

Various forms of agreements naturally arise in the service provider model as well as in multi-party computing models such as business-to-business, utility and grid computing. The role of these agreements is twofold: they stipulate obligations and expectations of the involved parties, and they represent the goals to be met by the infrastructure. As a consequence of this latter point, in order to automate run-time adaptation and management of systems and services, agreements should be encoded and integrated in management software platforms. In this paper, we review the state of the art in software support for various forms of agreements, for all stages of their life-cycle. We also review emerging platforms and technologies in standard bodies, industries and academia.