Provision of Service Level Agreements in Human-Enhanced Service-Oriented Computing Environments

Deploying Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in enterprises has become mainstream, as it provides business agility benefits. Today’s technologies allow to integrate human labour together with software services into service-oriented architectures therefore achieving smooth automation of business processes in such mixed systems. However, companies are continuously trying to optimize expenses associated with human labour. This results into scarcity of available resources and switching to more flexible paradigms of employment such as crowdsourcing. At the same time there is need to sustain the competitiveness by improving the quality of provided services and assuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, the inherent uncertainty of crowdsourcing environments and the impact of human factors increase risks and complicate service level management. Although there is a solid amount of research on SLA-based optimization, and techniques for prevention of SLA violations in SOA, however, it does not take into account the specific features of human-provided and crowdsourced services. This thesis addresses the problems by identifying specific control mechanisms and using adaptive techniques that can appropriately react to unexpected events and dynamically reconfigure certain processes characteristics or resources. It investigates SLA provision in crowdsourcing environments and adaptable techniques for SLA-aware execution of business process dependent on human-provided services. It presents, architectures, methods, and algorithms for SLA negotiation and fulfillment, and cost-based optimization in such environments.