Renegotiation of Electronic Brokerage Contracts

Abstract

CloudAnchor is a multiagent e-commerce platform which offers brokerage and resource trading services to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers and consumers. The access to these services requires the prior negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between the parties. In particular, the brokerage SLA (bSLA), which is mandatory for a business to have access to the platform, specifies the brokerage fee the business will pay every time it successfully trades a resource within the platform. However, while the negotiation of the resource SLA (rSLA) includes the uptime of the service, the brokerage SLA was negotiated for an unspecified time span. Since the commercial relationship – defined through the bSLA – between a business and the platform can be long lasting, it is essential for businesses to be able to renegotiate the bSLA terms, i.e., renegotiate the brokerage fee. To address this issue, we designed a bSLA renegotiation mechanism, which takes into account the duration of the bSLA as well as the past behaviour (trust) and success (transactions) of the business in the CloudAnchor platform. The results show that the implemented bSLA renegotiation mechanism privileges, first, the most reliable businesses, and, then, those with higher volume of transactions, ensuring that the most reliable businesses get the best brokerage fees and resource prices. The proposed renegotiation mechanism promotes the fulfilment of SLA by all parties and increases the satisfaction of the trustworthy businesses in the CloudAnchor platform. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.