Negotiating SLAs-An approach for a generic negotiation framework for WS-agreement

The current Web Services Agreement specification draft proposes a simple request-response protocol for agreement creation only addressing bilateral offer exchanges. This paper proposes a framework augmenting this WS-Agreement to enable negotiations according to a variety of bilateral and multilateral negotiation protocols. The framework design is based on a thorough analysis of taxonomies for negotiations from the literature in order to allow for capturing a variety of different negotiation models within a single, WS-Agreement compatible, framework. In order to provide for the intended flexibility, the proposed protocol takes a two-stage approach: a meta-protocol is conducted among interested parties to agree on a common negotiation protocol first before the real negotiation is carried out in the second step due to the protocol established in the first step. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.