Inspired by the experience of a river contract in Wallonia (Belgium) since 1990, the implementation of a first river contract has been initiated in a West African country, Burkina Faso. This application is not limited to a simple transposition of the Walloon model. The Burkina context calls for adaptation to the local environmental and socio-economical realities with an adequate partnership man...

This paper describes a novel contract based approach for defining, deploying, monitoring and enforcing service level agreements (SLA) in a dynamic e-Business environment. The current trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems with long and short business relationships. It appears highly like...

In this paper, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for QoS management based on soft probabilistic contracts. The authors approach also encompasses general QoS parameters, with “response time” as a particular case. In addition, the authors support composite QoS parameters, for example, combining timing aspects with “quality of data” or security level. They also study contract compositi...

In this paper, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for QoS management based on soft probabilistic contracts. The authors approach also encompasses general QoS parameters, with “response time” as a particular case. In addition, the authors support composite QoS parameters, for example, combining timing aspects with “quality of data” or security level. They also study contract compositi...

A good contract is often the key to a successful IT outsourcing relationship. The contract defines the rights, liability, and expectations of both the outsourcing vendor and the outsourcing customer concerned and is often the only solid mechanism for regulating the relationship of the parties. Outsourcing contracts are often of high value and last a relatively long time. It is therefore of part...

In this paper, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for QoS management based on soft probabilistic contracts. The authors approach also encompasses general QoS parameters, with “response time” as a particular case. In addition, the authors support composite QoS parameters, for example, combining timing aspects with “quality of data” or security level. They also study contract compositi...

A large number of interdependent issues in complex contract negotiation poses a significant challenge for current approaches, which becomes even more apparent when negotiation problems scale up. To address this challenge, we present a structured anytime search process with an agenda management mechanism using a hierarchical negotiation model, where agents search at various levels during the neg...

In Grid, the reputation of users is the important indicator for service selection, particularly in the situation with the combination of Grid technologies and economic models. A contract-management model based on reputation evaluation and a service selection algorithm are proposed in this paper. The applied strategy facilitates the users of similar reputation to carry out transactions. The expe...