SLA Driven Automatic Fault-Recovery Scheduling Method with Cost Evaluation

Telecoms need to change their operations more flexibly in accordance with diverse requirements for service quality. They have long operated networks with high availability (24/7) to support the emergency services, however their networks now provide ever more diverse and newer services. Telecoms can reduce operating expenses and even lower service prices if they make their operations more flexible on the basis of services' requirements instead of simply pursuing high availability. Thus, we researched the concept of Service Level Agreement (SLA) Driven Operation, which enables various decisions about failure recoveries to be automated on the basis of the service quality requirements.In this paper, to implement SLA Driven Operation to telecom operation, we focus on automating decisions about "how," "who," and "when" to take action for failure recovery. Moreover, we propose a method to automatically decide the optimal start time by assessing the schedule in terms of response cost, SLA violation cost, and lost profits. Then we estimate the effects and the risks that occur when the response start time is decided automatically. As a result, we demonstrate that applying the proposed method can be expected to sufficiently reduce cost with a very low risk of availability decline.