Procedure-based availability SLAs for Traffic Management Systems

Today´s Traffic Management Systems (TMS) shall meet various demands. One of them is availability of service. Failures in the system reduce the level of availability and have direct impact on the total cost of ownership (TCO) because of additional maintenance costs. Consequently, parameters of availability of service are often subject of contracts (so called Service Level Agreements) among system owners, maintenance contractors and component vendors. With the growing complexity of such multi-vendor systems consisting of various subsystems and components interconnected over numerous levels of hierarchy, enforcement of these agreements is becoming a challenging and complex task. Thus, procedure-based reasoning concepts are required in order to correctly map the gathered low-level resource metrics like the liveness of a particular component to the root-cause of the problem from a system perspective and consequently the right application specific SLA-parameters (such as availability of a node or a network). In this paper, we demonstrate the application of the LoM2HiS-framework as an example technology for the automatic enforcement of SLAs concerning availability in the field of TMS. It is illustrated, how the framework could be extended for procedure-based reasoning. Finally, we present first simulation results.