Using intelligent agents for service adaptation

Services are becoming widely used in the world of engineering and manufacturing as well. Both traditional and computational resources are often encapsulated as Web services, providing the basis for building service-oriented architectures (SOA) based on standards. Services are used on the basis of contractual agreements. A service level agreement (SLA) provides the operational definition of a service as part of a contract between a service provider and a service consumer and includes explicit format statements about the contracted service level. Thus, a SLA contains obligations and guarantees regarding the service in a business relationship. A machine-understandable representation of SLAs enables customers and service providers to monitor the fulfillment of SLAs, and make adaptations in case of SLA violations. The present paper describes a methodology to manage SLA adaptations combining existing techniques of software agents and the Semantic Web.