Resumen:
Quality of Service (QoS) attributes, such as execution time, availability, or cost, are critical for the usability of Web services. This in particular applies to service compositions, which are commonly used for implementing more complex, higher level, and/or cross-organizational tasks by assembling loosely-coupled individual service components (often provided and controlled by third parties). The QoS attributes of service compositions depend on the QoS attributes of the service components, as well as on environmental factors and the actual data being handled, and are usually regulated by means of Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), which define the permissible boundaries for the values of the related properties. Predicting whether an SLA will be violated for a given executing instance of a service composition is therefore very important. Such a prediction can be used for preventing or mitigating the consequences of SLA violations ahead of time.
We propose a method whereby constraints that model SLA conformance and violation are derived at any given point of the execution of a service composition. These constraints are generated using the structure of the composition and properties of the component services, which can be either known or measured empirically. Violation of these constraints means that the corresponding scenario is unfeasible, while satisfaction gives values for the constrained variables (start / end times for activities, or number of loop iterations) which make the scenario possible. These results can be used to perform optimized service matching or trigger preventive adaptation or healing.