Uncertainty in service provisioning relationships

Abstract

Web services encapsulate some well-defined functionality such as data storage, computation or a business process. An organization can delegate responsibility for the provision of a Web service to another organization with the formation of a Service Provisioning Relationship (SPR). Such relationships enable organizations to specialize in the provision of those Web services for which they have a comparative advantage, and to outsource responsibility for any other functionality on which they are dependent to the Web services provided by other organizations. This specialization can lead to significant increases in organizational efficiency. The scale of such increases is determined by the extent to which the presence of uncertainty in the Quality of Service (QoS) can be addressed by the organizations in the SPR. The requester of a Web service can be uncertain of the willingness and ability of the provider to provision a Web service with a certain QoS. The provider of a Web service can be uncertain of his ability to provision a Web service to each requester with a certain QoS. These uncertainties can endanger the economic viability of such relationships, and mitigate any increases in organizational efficiency. This thesis provides a number of key contributions to address these uncertainties in order to retain the economic viability of these relationships for both organizations. The key contributions are: an institutional framework for trust in SPRs, a structured language for the representation of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) as a contingent contract, and a theoretical and practical methodology for the creation of SLAs which are optimal with regard to the objectives of an organization.