We present our efforts at enabling a marketplace based on service level agreements (SLAs) for commercial print businesses, where print services can be queried, combined and searched in an automated way. Although SLAs have been an active research area in the computer networking domain, the technical and legal challenges in other industries have hindered the growth of SLAs. We believe that medium and large sized commercial print providers will profit from SLA-based marketplace as it will promote automation and better utilization of resources. We discuss the issues in incorporating SLAs in the existing commercial print workflows. We then present a protocol for negotiating SLAs among the print service providers and consumers. The negotiating protocol has support for offers as well as counter-offers. We then discuss our ongoing efforts for a prototype implementation of a SLA-based marketplace wherein we use two open source frameworks: 1) WSAG4J - for negotiating print services; and 2) Ptolemy II - for designing and analyzing print services. With these technologies, we will be able to hook up a large number of digital commercial print providers on to the SLA-based marketplace.
Sunil Kothari, Jun Zeng, Eric Hoarau, Giordano Beretta, John Recker, I-Jong Lin, "Toward a SLA-Based Marketplace for Digital Commercial Print Providers" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP27), 2011, pp 132 - 135, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2011.27.1.art00034_1