Software systems built by composing existing services are more and more capturing the interest of researchers and practitioners.
The envisaged long term scenario is that services, offered by some competing providers, are chosen by some consumers and used
for their own purpose, possibly, in conjunction with other services. In the case the consumer is not anymore satisfied by
the performance of some service, he can try to replace it with some other service. This implies the creation of a global market
of services and poses new requirements concerning validation of exploited services, security of transactions engaged with
services, trustworthiness, creation and negotiation of Service Level Agreements with these services. In this paper we focus
on the last aspect and present our approach for negotiation of Service Level Agreements. Our architecture supports the actuation
of various negotiation processes and offers a search-based algorithm to assist the negotiating parts in the achievement of
an agreement.
Keywords Quality of Service - Service Level Agreements - Negotiation - Optimization Heuristics