A Negotiation Protocol Framework for WS-Agreement

The Web Services Agreement specification defines a format and an establishment protocol for Service Level Agreements for Service Oriented Architectures. The current draft’s simple request-response protocol for agreement creation only addresses bilateral offer exchanges. This paper proposes a framework augmenting this WS-Agreement to enable negotiations according to a variety of - more advanced - negotiation protocols. A meta-protocol is presented to exchange information on supported negotiation protocols, agree on a protocol and then execute the negotition protocol itself. The meta-protocol is based on a comprehensive set of parameters describing the negotiation protocol to be conducted. With this framework a variety of bilateral and multilateral negotiation protocol definitions can be created, communicated to participating software agents and subsequently conducted, all resulting in valid Web Services Agreements.

By: Sebastian Hudert; Heiko Ludwig; Guido Wirtz

Published in: RC24094 in 2006

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