Implementing an SLA Negotiation Framework

Despite promising high value for electronic business, Service Level Agreements have not yet found major uptake in the business world. A major obstacle to adoption is the lack of adequate tools that facilitate and automate SLA establishment on both the consumer as well as the provider side. In this paper, we describe a generic framework for negotiating SLAs that has been designed and implemented by the authors. The components automate large parts of the negotiation process while at the same time letting the user retain control. An application scenario has been realised using our framework showing that the negotiation and establishment of SLAs is a viable solution for electronic contracting and that our framework can facilitate this task.