Ph.D. Preliminary Exam - Shuxing Cheng

Date: 09 Nov, 2009
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: 106 Atanasoff Hall
Topic: SLA Design for Competitive Service Market
Major Professor(s): Carl K. Chang


Abstract:

To capture business dynamics underlying SOA-based service systems, we propose and formalize the concept of competitive service market (CSM). A CSM is composed of a set of composite service providers, each managing a collection of atomic service providers. With the help of service composition protocol, composite service providers are able to invoke atomic services and aggregate them into value added composite services for servicing various types of customers' requests.  The business relationship between these market players are typically framed through the service level agreements (SLAs), which specify the attributes of QoS-based metrics, and service costs for the realized service provisioning. Hence, SLAs constitute the backbone structure for managing the CSM. This research aims to study the design methodology for SLAs that can be adopted via a CSM administrator's console. Due to the dynamic business environment and various types of uncertainties that can occur in the lifecycle of CSM, we identify several business scenarios. Against each scenario we propose a SLA design scheme that can meet its unique requirements. For instance, we apply the Bayesian-based estimator to capture the learning process during the multi-round negotiation process between two SLA design counterparts. We also cast the sequential SLA design scenario into a leader-follower game formulation. In the talk, I will present some preliminary results, and explore future research issues with some speculations.