Agent-based Negotiation Framework for Web Service's SLA

Dynamic establishment of a web service's Service Level Agreement (SLA) document that maintains end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) requirements has been identified as a cause of delay in developing web service based solutions. This is because service providers and consumers are usually engaged in a time consuming negotiation process. In order to accelerate the negotiation process, this paper proposes an agent-based conceptual framework for web service SLA negotiation which enables a single service provider to negotiate with multiple web service consumers at the same time. A utility-based negotiation strategy is used by negotiation agents to make decisions at all phases. A 3-tier multi-agent-based system prototype was developed to validate the framework. Web service consumers and providers use the front end GUI-based application to input their requirements preferences which we converted into WS-Policy compliant documents used in the negotiation. The actual negotiation processes are managed and conducted by software agents representing consumers and providers at the back-end system. Simulation results show that 90% of the negotiations are successful.