A Structural Analysis of SLAs and Dependencies Using Conceptual Modelling Approach

Making good use of Service Level Agreements (SLA) becomes crucial for an enterprise both to provide value added products and services to customers and to protect the interest of parties involved in the business activities. Well formed and effective structural representation and management of SLAs in conceptual modeling can greatly support the understanding and communication of service development and deployment as well as maintenance of quality of service. Existing specifications and structures for SLAs do not fully formalize and support for different automatic and dynamic behavioral aspects needed within business enterprises due to lack of study focusing on SLAs templates and their contents, which are mostly written on Natural Language (NL). We address the issues of how to use conceptual models to describe the structures of SLAs and the various relationships between SLAs and their items, and hence to better depict business domains. With focus on the contents, process, and dependencies among SLAs, we aim to use so generated concept model for service discovery, service delivery and scheduling.