  Automated management and monitoring of service contracts like Service Level
Agreements (SLAs) or higher-level policies is vital for efficient and reliable
distributed service-oriented architectures (SOA) with high quality of ser-vice
(QoS) levels. IT service provider need to manage, execute and maintain
thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services,
which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the
current technol-ogy. I propose a novel rule-based knowledge representation (KR)
for SLA rules and a respective rule-based service level management (RBSLM)
framework. My rule-based approach based on logic programming provides several
advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge
representation and high levels of automation as well as flexibility to adapt to
rapidly changing business requirements. Therewith, I address an urgent need
service-oriented busi-nesses do have nowadays which is to dynamically change
their business and contractual logic in order to adapt to rapidly changing
business environments and to overcome the restricting nature of slow change
cycles.
