Mathias Salle

Using the event calculus for tracking the normative state of contracts

In this work, we have been principally concerned with the representation of contracts so that their normative state may be tracked in an automated fashion over their deployment lifetime. The normative state of a contract, at a particular time, is the aggregation of instances of normative relations that hold between contract parties at that time, plus the current values of contract variables. The effects of contract events on the normative state of a contract are specified using an XML formalization of the Event Calculus, called ecXML. We use an example mail service agreement from the domain of web services to ground the discussion of our work. We give a characterization of the agreement according to the normative concepts of obligation, power and permission, and show how the ecXML representation may be used to track the state of the agreement, according to a narrative of contract events. We also give a description of a state tracking architecture, and a contract deployment tool, both of which have been im...

IT service management driven by business objectives An application to incident management

In this paper we address the problem of ensuring business-IT alignment. We describe a method and a system for decision support in IT service management driven by alignment with the business objectives of the enterprise that the IT supports. Our technical proposition, called IT management by business objectives (MBO) is applicable to most of the domains of IT service management, such as incident management, change management, and others. The technology consists of some components that are reusable across domains, together with guidelines and patterns for building complementary components in order to develop domain-specific solutions

Business Driven Prioritization of Service Incidents

As a result of its increasing role in the enterprise, the Information Technology (IT) function is changing, morphing from a technology provider into a strategic partner. Key to this change is its ability to deliver business value by aligning and supporting the business objectives of the enterprise. IT Management frameworks such as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library, [3]) provide best practices and processes that support the IT function in this transition. In this paper, we focus on one of the various cross-domain processes documented in ITIL involving the service level, incident, problem and change management processes and present a theoretical framework for the prioritization of service incidents based on their impact on the ability of IT to align with business objectives. We then describe the design of a prototype system that we have developed based on our theoretical framework and present how that solution for incident prioritization integrates with other IT management software products of the HP OpenviewTM management suite.

Performance monitoring of service-level agreements for utility computing using the event calculus

Utility computing (UC) is concerned with the provisioning of computational resources (compute-power, storage, network bandwidth), on a per-need basis, to corporate businesses. Service-level agreements (SLAs) - contracts between a provider and a customer - are a sine qua non in the deployment of UC. A crucial stage in the life-cycle of contracts (such as SLAs) is their automated performance monitoring while active; a significant aspect of which concerns the tracking of contract state. In this work, we define an ontology to capture aspects of SLAs that are pertinent to the tracking of state for performance monitoring, and generalise these aspects so that the ontology may be applicable to other contract domains. The ontology is formalised as an XML-based language, called CTXML (contract tracking XML). The semantics for CTXML are presented in terms of a computational model based on the event calculus.

Electronic Contract Framework for Contractual Agents

In this paper, we propose an agent-based framework for the automation of contractual relationships. Contracts are defined as specification of expected behaviours and are modelled using the logical constructs of norms and sanctions. Based on the dynamic nature of norms, we introduce a collaborative protocol used by contractual agents to share their views on contractual commitments. Lastly, we present the conceptual architecture and the high-level reasoning process of contractual agents.

Understanding IT organizations

Understanding IT organization is essential for ensuring a successful transformation phase in IT outsourcing deals. We present a model of IT organization, a methodology for deriving it - based both on ethnography and data mining - and a suite of tools for representing and visualizing the model, and to help design changes to bring the organization from its current (AS-IS) state to a desired (TO-BE) state, along with tools for comparing models of organizations based on qualities and characteristics that are expected to have a bearing on the success of the IT transformation step.