Risk in agreement networks: Decision support for service-intermediaries

The current trend towards dynamic and highly scalable service provisioning fosters the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms and manifests the need for dynamic composition of services. In order to enable the combination of services and hence, the collaboration between different service providers, technical challenges like the compatibility of interfaces have to be dealt with. Additionally, economic issues concerning profit, reliability and risk have to be taken into consideration. This work covers economic considerations from the viewpoint of a service intermediary that offers complex services to customers and purchases services from supplying providers. The intermediary has to decide, which SLAs to offer to consumers and which SLAs have to be established with supplying providers. The decision support for the intermediary that is presented throughout this paper is an adaptation of security portfolio optimization stemming from finance. It is based on monitoring data of SLAs that the intermediary had established in the past with consumers and with supplying providers. Finally, the decision support is exemplified in a case-study. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.