WS-Agreement based service negotiation in a heterogeneous service environment

With the ever increasing importance of web services and the Cloud as a reliable commodity to provide business value as well as consolidate IT infrastructure, electronic contracts have become very important. WS-Agreement has itself established as a well accepted container format for describing such contracts. However, the semantic interpretation of the terms contained in these contracts, as well as the process of agreeing to contracts when multiple options have to be considered (negotiation), are still pretty much dealt with on a case by case basis. In this paper we address the issues of diverging contracts and varying contract negotiation protocols by introducing the concept of a contract aware marketplace, which abstracts from the heterogeneous offers of different services providers. This allows for the automated consumption of services solely based on preferences, instead of additional restrictions such as understanding of contract terms and/or negotiation protocols. We also contribute an evaluation of several existing negotiation concepts/protocols. We think that reducing the complexity for automated contract negotiation and thus service consumption is a key for the success of future service and Cloud infrastructures.