A Comprehensive Ontology-Based Approach for SLA Obligations Monitoring

Specifying clear quality of service (QoS) agreements between service providers and consumers is particularly important for the successful deployment of service-oriented architectures. The related challenges include correctly elaborating and monitoring QoS contracts (SLA: service level agreement) to detect and handle their violations. In this paper, first, we study and analyze existing SLA-related models. Then, we elaborate a complete, generic and semantically richer ontology-based model of SLA. We used the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to express SLA obligations in our model. This language facilitates the SLA monitoring process and the eventual action triggering in case of violations. We used this model to automatically generate semantic-enabled QoS obligations monitors. We have also developed a prototype to validate our model and our monitoring approach. Finally, we believe that this work is a step ahead to the total automation of the SLA management process.