From Service Markets to Service Economies – An infrastructure for protocol-generic SLA negotiations

Visions of 21st century’s information systems show highly specialized digital services and resources, interacting continuously and with a global reach. For a broad adoption of this vision in a commercial context it is crucial to have a mechanism in place to guarantee quality of service and to decentrally coordinate the involved resources. Current service infrastructures try to tackle these problems by applying socioeconomic mechanisms such as electronic negotiations and service level agreements. Such technologies allow for the implementation of electronic service markets in analogy to real-world markets for everyday goods. However, economic theory claims that different market situations and negotiated products (i.e. SLAs) demand different negotiation protocols in order to reach the highest-possible overall efficiency of the system. Thus we argue that next generation service infrastructures will be based on a global service economy where several different service markets and thus protocols are present at any given point in time. In this paper we present a novel approach for such an infrastructure, based on structured protocol descriptions and software-agent technology.