SLAs and Negotiation in Ontogrid: Scenarios and Requirements Shamima Paurobally University of Westminster Michael Wooldridge, Valentina Tamma University of Liverpool

2 Overview of Talk Motivation of negotiation for SLAs Two scenarios Requirements from scenarios An overview of Ontogrids implementation Some results

3 Dynamic Provisioning of Grid services Grid + Semantic Web + P2P + MAS have much in common in terms of high-level vision Cooperation is a recurring theme Resource owners may (or not) choose to charge for their resources. SLAs state the terms of the agreements between the consumer and the provider as a contract for the provider to perform a task or to provide agreed resources. Agreements on resource provisioning: the providers commitment to execute a task or provide the resources. terms about performance levels and penalties (provisioning).

4 Negotiation for Dynamic SLAs Reconciliation between preferences and constraints through the negotiation of SLAs. SOA, VOs, enterprise Grids which can support commercial applications Optimal allocation of resources to grid users while assuring some specific quality of service for all Negotiation Protocols, Contract Definitions, Utilities

5 Agreements in Cooperation Lifecycle Grid Services (=resources+constraints) VO Formation Agreement on who will participate in VO, who will work with each other Virtual Organisations (=sets of services) Team formation Agreement on who does which task with which resource Teams (=subsets of VOs) Scheduling Agreement on how to dynamically coordinate TIME

6 Scenario 1: InsuranceGrid YAll B.V. and Boyd International, Netherlands Traditional ways of handling claims in the insurance sector Slow and costly because of inter-dependency between many parties Every aspect of claim is dealt by a different department Need for chain integration Exchange large amount of data and maintain long term relationships Human translation from one domain to another Needs automation!

7 The Insurance Grid Facts DamageSecure looks after and controls all businesses involved in dealing with car damage claims for a number of insurance companies. To enhance the quality and efficiency of the total damage claims handling process Every year, ~100,000 damages are reported to DamageSecure 40% repairs, 60% replacement Automation could save 172Million Euros

8 Repair Grid Scenario Expert Services Customer DamageSecure Insurance Services Repair Services i1i1 i2i2 i5i5 i3i3 i4i4 Negotiation Long-term Contracts With repair services Contracts, Insurance policies SLAs (dynamic)

9 Front End of the Insurance Grid

10 InsuranceGrid Contracts Insurance companies Repair companies Contracts between insurance and repair companies Contracts between insurance and repair companies Contracts between customers and insurance companies Contracts between customers and insurance companies All policies in Aksa insurance All damage reports are Aksa All insured vehicles at Aksa

11 Car Fraud Grid 1.When a customer wishes to become a client 2.When an insurance service receives a claim FraudGridManager Search reports, SLAs for suspicious cases

12 Goal for Negotiation in Insurance Grid Add web services negotiation to the insurance repair process between repair services and DamageSecure Advantages: More efficient than the current manual settlement process Provides a more healthy market for claim settlement Repair prices will drop Quality of repairs will increase because of open competition Web Services Negotiation in an Insurance Grid S.Paurobally, C. van Aart, V.Tamma, M. Wooldridge, P. van Hapert. Proceedings of AAMAS 2007, Industrial Track

13 Negotiation for SLAs in the Middleware: VO Authorisation User: authorisation request reflecting demand of the tasks Users have: Digital certificates that attest to their attributes Membership in VO Requirements for resource Resource owners have: Access policies for resource Resource sharing constraints Different goals: a client might want to get access the resource ASAP Resource owner want to collect as much information about the clients attributes before granting access Negotiation on cost and security demands Client trusts the server apriori but the server does not trust the client

14 Example of Negotiation for Authorisation Olson, Winslett et. al. ICDEW 06

15 Using Bilateral Negotiation Resource Owner offer({Ca,Cd,Cc} ) offer({Ca,Cb,Ce,Cf}) User Negotiation Service Negotiation Service accept({Cd,Ce,Cg}) Repeat until deadline or received counter offer is better than generated offer Advertise (Ca, Cb, Cc, Cd, Ce, Cf,Cg)

16 Trust Negotiation in VO SLAs consisting of certificates, and indicate level of trustworthiness Trust is established between parties based on their properties proved through credential disclosure. Negotiation allows credentials and policies to be disclosed between parties in a bilateral and iterative manner that incrementally establishes trust. Parties iteratively disclose more sensitive credentials until the authorisation policy is satisfied or one party gives up.

17 Requirements from Scenarios Chain Integration (translation of contracts and SLAs) Automation to draft SLAs Multi-issues in SLA and relative importance of issues Quantitative and qualitative issues (negotiation about information exchange) 1-many and many-many negotiation Competition between self-interested parties Protocols and strategies Preferences and their ontology Trust and security in a VO Business process monitoring 3 rd party surveyor/authority Counter malicious behaviour Verification and validation: Prove properties of the negotiation protocols

18 Architecture of the Negotiation Service

19 Ontogrids Negotiation Service 1. Messages that can be exchanged Port-type of web service e.g. offer, bid, accept, cfp, propose, submit_bid 2. Negotiation protocols (Business Logic) Sequence of invoking the methods e.g. provider cfp consumer propose provider accept consumer inform 3. Preferences Ontology To decide what makes a good deal e.g. reserve prices 4. Decision strategies To evaluate and generate the content of the messages e.g. time dependent concession

20 Representing SLAs in Speech Act Subject Type IssuesList is a list of tuple issues {(name, value, isNegotiable),….} Example (EPR of provider, JobID YU7, {(price,£20,true), (response,20ms,false)}, bidNo 3, 1000ms)

21 Evaluating the Negotiation Negotiation issues on: price of repair, speed of repair, location of repair service, colour of vehicle, method of repair Evaluating the SLAs reached From providers or consumers viewpoint Using preferences and strategy How long to achieve SLA Evaluating each offer

22 Convergence towards Agreement Contract Net Protocol

23 Utility of Deals with Varying Deadline Bilateral Negotiation

24 Comparing Various Strategies

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