We illustrate a process for nding an improved variant of an aboriginal whaling management procedure strike limit algorithm (SLA), applying the merging and opti-misation approach of Givens (1997; 1999a). A modiied version of the SLA developed by Punt and Butterworth (1997) was chosen as the procedure to be optimised for management of the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort Seas stock of bowhead whales. The ...

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) represents an agreement between a service user and a provider in the context of a particular service provision. SLAs contain Quality of Service properties that must be maintained by a provider. These are generally defined as a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs). These properties need to be measurable and must be monitored during the provision of the service t...

In the business Grid environment, the business relationship between a customer and a service provider should be clearly defined. The responsibility of each partner can be stated in the so-called Service Level Agreement (SLA). In the context of SLA-based workflows, the business model is an important factor to determine its job-resource-mapping policy. However, this aspect has not been described ...

To access the Internet, companies define a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Nevertheless, the current Internet does not assure Quality of Service (QoS), what points toward the concept of network virtualization and software defined network (SDN) to support the Future Internet. Moreover, the initial parameter defined in the SLA could be insufficient if the tra...

As cloud service providers leverage server virtualization to host applications in virtual machines (VMs), they must ensure proper allocation of resource capacities in order to satisfy the contracted service level agreements (SLAs) with the application owners. However, the ever-growing number of virtual and physical machines within such infrastructure creates greater challenges in quickly and ef...

Providers of cloud environments must tackle the challenge of configuring their system to provide maximal performance while minimizing the cost of resources used. However, at the same time, they must guarantee an SLA (service-level agreement) to the users. The SLA is usually associated with a certain level of QoS (quality of service). As response time is perhaps the most widely used QoS metric, ...

Nowadays, even with the existence of many Cloud Providers (CP) in the market, it is still impossible to see CPs who guarantee, or at least offer, an SLA specification to Cloud Users (CU) interests: not just offering percentage of availability, but also guaranteeing specific performance parameters for a certain Cloud application. Due to (1) the huge size of CPs’ IT infrastructures and (2) the hi...

Cloud computing is a newly emerged computing infrastructure that builds on the latest achievements of diverse research areas, such as Grid computing, Service-oriented computing, business process management and virtualization. An important characteristic of Cloud-based services is the provision of non-functional guarantees in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), such as guarantees on exe...