An Analysis of Service Trading Architectures

Automating the creation and management of SLAs in elec tronic commerce scenarios brings many advantages, such as increasing the speed in the contracting process or allowing providers to deploy an automated provision of services based on those SLAs. We focus on the service trading process, which is the process of locating, selecting, nego tiating, and creating SLAs. This process can be applied to a variety of scenarios and, hence, their requirements are also very different. Despite some service trading architectures have been proposed, currently there is no analysis about which one fits better in each scenario. In this paper, we define a set of properties for abstract service trading architectures based on an analysis of several practical scenarios. Then, we use it to analyse and compare the most relevant abstract architectures for service trad ing. In so doing, the main contribution of this article is a first approach to settle the basis for a qualitative selection of the best architecture for similar trading scenarios.