Traditionally, the risks associated with granting customers and their users access to services and resources are mitigated by contractual frameworks, such as service level agreements (SLAs). However, in large and highly dynamic federated environments, also external and previously unknown users must be handled in an automated manner, which limits the available options to negotiate SLAs. In this ...

Beyond the classic hierarchical customer/provider relationship, service providers are more and more cooperating with each other on an equal footing. Service modeling techniques have been applied successfully to hierarchical sourcing strategies as a blueprint for service management processes and to define the basis for describing the communication and collaboration between IT service providers. ...

There is a rich amount of literature on services from Information Technology (IT) (Management view) and IT System Engineering (ITSE) (Engineering view) domains. However, such a variety has produced disparate views. Furthermore, given that IT and ITSE service-based systems must be linked to business services (the User view), conceptual interrelationships are increased, causing yet more diversity...

Automated management and monitoring of service contracts like Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or higherlevel policies is vital for efficient and reliable distributed service-oriented architectures (SOA) with high quality of service (QoS) levels. IT service provider need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new lev...