Ideas on Guarantees of Services
László Zsolt Varga
MTA SZTAKI
System Development
Department
19.02.2007
SZTAKI
•Computer and Automation Research Institute of
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
•Founded in 1964, one of the biggest institutes
of the Academy
•The single research institution in Hungary in the
field of applied information technology
•Application oriented, revenues from contracts
•People:
•Staff about 300
•Highly educated, Academicians, Dr. Academy, PhD,
University full professors
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SZTAKI – Memberships
• European Research Consortium of
Informatics and Mathematics, full
membership in 1994
• Member of the World Wide Web
Consortium
•Centre of Excellence in the 5th
Framework Program of the European
Union
•ISO 9002 certification and quality
assurance system for SW-development
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System Development Department
•Research and innovative application of the
newest software technology results
•Component and agent based computing for the
development of internet applications
•Methods promoting the interoperation of
distributed and heterogeneous systems
•Working with leading research institutes,
computing and telecommunication companies
(references: CERN, IBM, Sun, Nokia, Motorola)
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Introduction
•Service Oriented Architectures (Grid, Agents, Web Services,
Semantic Web Services, …)
publication
Service
Service
Registry
Registry
Service
Service
Provider
Provider
search
service invocation
(connection)
Service
Service
Consumer
Consumer
•Before connecting: service consumers want to obtain guarantees
related to the services
•During service utilisation and after the termination: service
consumers want to monitor and evaluate whether the guarantees
are met or not
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Guarantee
•WS-Agreement:
•„Guarantee terms define the assurance on service quality (or
availability) associated with the service described by the service
definition terms.
•They refer to the service description that is the subject of the
agreement and define service level objectives (describing for
example the quality of service on execution that needs to be met),
qualifying conditions (defining for example when those
objectives have to be met) and business value expressing the
importance of the service level objectives.”
•Fine, this is generic:
assurance and service level objective are general
•Let’s see the examples
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Assurance
•„One motivation for creating a service agreement
between a service provider and a service consumer is to
provide assurance to the service consumer on the
service quality and/or resource availability offered by
the service provider.”
•Single service consumer? And the provider side?
•E.g. in the banking domain supervisor organisations are
also interested to know whether the bank followed all
regulations and guidelines that make sure that the bank
can provide services reliably for a long time
•Consumers want assurance on repeated service
availability for several consumers
=> different type of assurance on service quality
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Service Level Objective
•„In the job submission example, an agreement may
provide assurance on the bounds (e.g., minimum) on the
availability of resources such as memory, type of central
processing unit (CPU), storage and/or job execution
beginning or completion time. These bounds are
referred to as service level objectives (SLO).”
•Is an SLO always a directly measurable parameter of the
service execution?
•E.g. does a healthcare treatment service meat the
objectives only if the patient regains complete health
within a time limit? Even if it proves to be impossible?
•No, in this case we want that the best practice is
applied during service execution => different type of SLO
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Measuring Service Execution Practice
•Typical quality of service:
•directly measurable parameter of the service
•or the result of the service
•Sometimes service execution practice has to be
measured as well
•Moreover, the provider might have to be able to
explain to the consumer why the best practice
produced the given result
•Log file?
•More than that: process documentation, Grid
Provenance, http://www.gridprovenance.org
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K4Care Home Care Platform
•The goal of the K4Care project is to develop an
informatics platform to manage the information needed
to guarantee improved home care service for the
increasing number of senior population requiring
personalized home care assistance
•Project home page http://www.k4care.net
•From 2006 to 2009
•Medical assistance in home care naturally needs
distributed service oriented architecture
•Agent and knowledge technologies
•The services provided by the platform to the users are
composed of services provided by platform agents
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Medical Guidelines
•In theory yes, but how to support them in practice with
information technology?
•Formal Intervention Plan (FIP):
•single problem, generic guidelines
•Typical patient:
•several problems, specific needs
•Individual Intervention Plan (IIP):
•several FIPs combined and instantiated with specific values
•The service provided to the patient is the IIP
•Service Level Objective:
•the provided service (IIP) should follow the best available practice
(expressed in a set of FIPs)
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Next Steps/Future Directions?
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