NFPSLAM-SOC 2009

Non Functional Properties and Service Level Agreements Management in Service Oriented Computing Workshop (NFPSLAM-SOC'09)

http://events.sti2.at/nfpslam-soc09/

The workshop will be held within the "Quality of Service" workshop track of the 7th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC'09) http://www.icsoc.org/

November 23/24, 2009, Stockholm, Sweden

IMPORTANT DATES: -
 * Full Paper Submission: Sep 14, 2009
 * Notification of Acceptance: Sep 30, 2009
 * Submission of camera-ready version for pre-proceedings: Nov 1, 2009
 * Workshops day: Nov 23/24, 2009
 * Camera-ready version for LNCS post-proceedings: Jan TBA, 2010

THEME: --- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a key aspect for rapidly evolving businesses that require agile system composability and flexibility. As core concepts of any SOA-based system, services have recently received significant interest. They can be used to support Business-to-Business (B2B), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and collaborations within or between Virtual Organizations. Like other software components services expose both functional properties (i.e. what they do) and non-functional properties (i.e. the way they are supplied). Non-functional properties (NFPs) of a system are many and varied, including all properties, which are not directly related to the functionality provided. NFPs include quality of service (QoS) as well as other properties such as cost, adherence to standards and obligations on the consumer/provider. QoS is one of the most important subsets of non-functional properties. Although the term QoS is traditionally used to refer specifically to network performance and reliability characteristics (and methods of guaranteeing these properties) in the context of SOA the term must refer to a wider variety of service properties. This is because there are numerous properties which can be used as indicators of quality (including, e.g. performance, dependability, security, accuracy, customer service, trust, etc.). The term, as applied in SOA, must also refer to properties of system components at different levels of granularity (e.g. network, server, service, operation).

Non-functional properties play an important role in all service related tasks in the service lifecycle, including discovery, selection and operation of services. On one hand, the customer wants to differentiate the services based on their non-functional properties given similar functionalities provided. The service provider, on the other hand, needs to optimize its service landscapes with respect to the non-functional properties to stay competitive. Therefore, modeling, provisioning and managing service related tasks such as discovery, composition, negotiation and monitoring based on NFPs become fundamental challenges in Service-Oriented Architectures with real business settings. Directly connected to the tasks mentioned above are the specification, enforcement and management of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs give the service consumer some level of guarantee that the services provided by the provider will operate within acceptable bounds, particularly regarding the non-functional properties and QoS attributes. At the same time SLAs serve a role for the provider in resource capacity planning and avoiding unexpected legal wrangles. With the ever-growing demand for eBusiness, service providers are increasingly interested in enforcing contracts electronically allowing autonomous supervision of service status and management. Machine-understandable NFPs and QoS models are therefore key to the widespread uptake of SLAs as well as all of the service related tasks mentioned above.

The workshop aims to tackle the research problems around models, concepts, languages and methodologies that enable the specifications of non-functional properties and Service Level Agreements in the context of Service Oriented Computing. This edition aims also at providing a forum to address the main challenges of bringing transparent, multi-level, and holistic NFP and SLA management into service oriented systems. Such an effort naturally requires a multi-domain and multi-disciplinary approach, for instance, service-oriented architectures, model-driven development, software engineering, performance management, and enterprise computing. This enlarged view over the NFP and SLA topics is reflected in the new workshop title including Management.

The first edition of the workshop was organized at the ICSOC 2007, followed by the second edition at ECOWS 2008. The workshops constitute a series of successful forums, each with more than 30 participants and 12 paper presentations.

TOPICS:

The following indicates the general focus of the workshop. However, related contributions are welcome as well.

service-oriented systems multi-level SLAs. and machine learning techniques. virtualized infrastructures.
 * Languages for describing NFP attributes and offers.
 * NFP modeling, description, and annotation.
 * NFP-based discovery, selection, and ranking of Web Services.
 * NFP-based negotiation, mediation, and agreement of service contracts.
 * Formal methods for NFP and Quality of Services.
 * Quality metrics, KPIs, and requirement for services.
 * NFP and SLA driven services composition and selection.
 * NFP-based monitoring, accounting and recovery.
 * Business requirements for electronic contracts.
 * Legal status and requirements on SLAs.
 * Cost and economic models for SLAs.
 * Security and trust aspects in SLAs.
 * Specification and modeling of Service Level Agreements in
 * Methodologies and techniques for translation of hierarchical, and
 * SLA requirements for Cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS).
 * SLA negotiation and e-contracting.
 * SLA-driven planning and provisioning in service-oriented systems.
 * Optimization methodologies and techniques for SLA management.
 * SLA monitoring, reporting, and compliance.
 * SLA lifecycle management.
 * Event correlation, analytics, root cause analysis.
 * Prediction models for non-functional properties, especially statistics
 * SLA-driven adjustment, autonomic management at run time.
 * Techniques and approaches of SLA-aware resource management, including
 * The relationship of SLAs and IT operational policies.
 * Models, frameworks, and tools to support holistic SLA management.

SUBMISSIONS: -

Papers should be between 8 to 15 pages and prepared in accordance with the Springer LNCS format. Detailed instructions for authors are available on the LNCS website at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. All papers will receive a peer-review. Proceedings of the workshop will be published by Springer.

All the papers should be submitted in electronic format (pdf version) at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nfpslamsoc2009

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: -- Flavio De Paoli (Universita degli studi di Milano - Bicocca, Italy) Ioan Toma (STI Innsbruck, Austria) Hui Li (SAP Research, Germany) Ramin Yahyapour (Dortmund University of Technology, Germany) Marcel Tilly (European Microsoft Innovation Centre, Germany) Andrea Maurino (Universita degli studi di Milano - Bicocca, Italy) Wolfgang Theilmann (SAP Research, Germany) This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP