A service accountability framework for QoS service management and engineering

Service science, management and engineering (SSME) research is to study the methodology and technology for service innovation, design, development and delivery. Since service industry is very quality-sensitive and trust-dependent, we propose a service accountability management framework to detect, diagnose, defuse and disclose the root cause for any problematic service process. The accountability support is important for SSME since service processes often rely on external service providers to deliver part of the service functionalities. A service system must have effective yet efficient mechanisms to ensure that every external service is delivering a consistent and acceptable level of performance to meet the end-to-end quality of service (QoS) of the whole service process. In this paper, we present the accountability framework, identify the components in an accountable service architecture, and design an accountability diagnosis methodology. We also briefly present the inteLLigent Accountability Management Architecture (LLAMA) project which implements the accountability service bus (ASB), an agent-based middleware to support the monitoring, diagnosis, and reconfiguration of e-services. LLAMA ASB interacts with accountability agents to monitor services and the Accountability Authority to automatically diagnose faulty situations. The LLAMA technology is useful to ensure the QoS in SSME-based systems.