SOC Research Area:
Complex Service Negotiation and Management

To provide intelligent enablement and automation of dynamic service agreement negotiation and adaptive management of composite services to ensure their collective functionality, end-to-end quality of service and stateful coordination in complex service-oriented environments.

 

Background

SOC promises a world of cooperating services where application components can be assembled with little effort into a network of services that are loosely coupled to create dynamic business processes and agile applications spanning organisations and computing platforms. Management of services and provision processes in such a complex environment is critical to ensure all the functional and non-functional requirements of the provided services are met both at the individual services and composed application levels. In particular, automation support is required in identification of the most appropriate services and service providers, negotiation of collective service level agreements (SLA) for the composition, and coordinated execution of the composed services to ensure their collective functionality and end-to-end quality of service (QoS). Due to the dynamic nature of service environments the service discovery, negotiation, composition and execution need to be adaptive and responsive to the changing requirements and exceptions inherent in such complex environments.

 

Research Issues/Capabilities

The research into Complex Service Negotiation and Management addresses several key challenges of Service-Oriented Computing, including:

	Dynamic service discovery, profiling and trust propagation
	Automated service level agreement ( SLA ) negotiation and collective composition
	End-to-end QoS optimisation and SLA lifecycle management
	Adaptive service execution coordination, exception handling and quality assurance

The research is conducted by a team of internationally renowned researchers and postgraduate research students contributing expertise in a range of technologies including intelligent agents, automated negotiations, complex systems, workflow technologies and web/grid service engineering, from six closely related research programs:

	Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems led by Prof. Ryszard Kowalczyk
	Component Software and Enterprise Systems led by Prof. Jun Han
	Complex Intelligent Systems led by Prof. Tim Hendtlass
	Workflow Technology led by Prof. Yun Yang
	Web and Data Engineering led by A/Prof. Chengfei Liu
	Information Systems led by A/Prof. Judy McKay

 

Selected R&D projects

The research into Complex Service Negotiation and Management is carried out in a number of R&D projects in collaboration with external partners, including:

	Adaptive Service Agreement and Process Management in Services Grids in collaboration with DSTO, EIN and Telstra
	Adaptive Services Grid in collaboration with the EU Consortium of 21 research and industry partners
	Services Environment Network for Virtual Organisations in collaboration with EIN
	Smart Information Environments in collaboration with DSTO

 

Other research projects carried out by research staff and postgraduates include:

	Qualitative Decision Making in Agent Negotiations
	Adaptive Control of QoS in Open Service Environments
	Adaptive Management of Grid Services with Software Agents
	Agent-based Negotiation in Services Grids
	Agent-Mediated Workflow Management in Virtual Enterprises