Towards Industry-Strength SLA Optimization Capabilities for Service Chains

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) play a crucial role in gluing service chains together; maintaining sustainable SLAs can reduce the volatility and the number of breakdowns in the service chains. Current practice shows that SLAs are derived from manual negotiations between service providers and service customers. Due to lack of tool support, these SLAs are often subjective and incapable of reflecting the real capabilities of service enterprises. This paper reviews the state of the art of SLA optimization in the contexts of SLA management, e-business and optimization techniques, and concludes that five major areas need to be enhanced in order to provide industry-strength SLA optimization capabilities for both service enterprises and service chains.