A Conceptual Framework for Automated Service Trading

Resumen. Automating the creation and management of SLAs in electronic commerce scenarios brings many advantages, such as increasing the speed in the contracting process or allowing providers to deploy an automated provision of services based on those SLAs. We focus on the service trading process, which is the process of locating, selecting, negotiating, and creating SLAs. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework that can be used to analyse existing efforts in order to develop concrete architectures that effectively address the problem of the automated service trading. The novel contributions of this paper are threefold: we identify the roles and interactions that are necessary to carry out this automated service trading, we motivate and introduce the idea of trading protocols, and we define the elements that are necessary to support an automated decision-making in service trading.