Uncertainty and Uncertainty Tolerance in Service Provisioning

Johari Abdullah and Aad van Moorsel

School of Computing Science

Newcastle University, NE1 7RU, UK

{fjohari.abdullah, aad.vanmoorselg}@ncl.ac.uk

http://cs.ncl.ac.uk/

Abstract

One of the challenges for Internet-based service provisioning is to provide a measure of quality control

to the end users. One way to enable this is by having a form of contractual agreement such

as employing Service Level Agreement between the customer (end user) and service provider. We

argue that such agreement has inherent uncertainty in the form of customer’s state of belief towards

the compliance of the agreement. This paper focuses on three main areas. Firstly, we discuss the

problem of uncertainty within service provisioning offer and subsequently introduce the concept of

uncertainty tolerance. Secondly, we discuss our approach of providing a measure of tolerance towards

uncertainty which involves the application of Bayesian and Decision Networks. Finally, we

present a case study to illustrate the problem and our solution, followed by an empirical evaluation

to show that our solution works.

Keywords: Uncertainty, Uncertainty Tolerance, Service Provisioning, Bayesian Networks