Incorporating agreements on service options into BPEL-based services

To achieve flexibility in Service-Oriented Computing, applied values of service options, such as required payment and application-specific quality values, should be determined and agreed for every pair of a service provider and a consumer, by matching both requirements or negotiating with each other. This work proposes a framework for development of agents that provide Web services with service agreements determined for every unit of service provision. The proposed framework supports lifecycle management of service agreements, namely, implementation of the preliminary process to build agreements. It also supports implementation of service processes that change its behavior according to the established agreements. The framework makes use of BPEL, a standard language to specify a process that implements Web services, and thus facilitate to incorporate additional mechanisms regarding service options into a common approach for development of Web services.