Citation: Peoples, C.; Tariq, Z.; Georgalas, N.; Moore, A. Analysis of a Personalized Provision of Service Level Agreement (SLA) Algorithm. Electronics 2023, 12, 1231. https:// doi.org/10.3390/electronics12051231 Academic Editor: Domenico Ursino Received: 31 January 2023 Revised: 25 February 2023 Accepted: 28 February 2023 Published: 4 March 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). electronics Article Analysis of a Personalized Provision of Service Level Agreement (SLA) Algorithm Cathryn Peoples 1, * , Zeeshan Tariq 1 , Nektarios Georgalas 2 and Adrian Moore 1 1 School of Computing, Ulster University, Belfast BT15 1AP, UK 2 Applied Research, BT Group PLC, Martlesham IP5 3RE, UK * Correspondence: c.peoples@ulster.ac.uk Abstract: The existence of restricted Service Level Agreement (SLA) choices, which typically cor- respond with a couple of service tiers, can result in a customer accepting a service that may not effectively respond to their needs. From a service provider perspective, it is also a less than optimum business model, with capacity being reserved for customers who will not use it and subsequently being unavailable for customers who would. We, therefore, advocate the use of personalized SLAs to avoid such situations, which can ideally be set up without the assistance of a human operator. We suggest classifying customers according to their distinguishing features, one of which includes a customer’s propensity to have online devices in their home. Through the results presented in this paper, we are confident about the accuracy of our classification results; however, we recognize that there are opportunities for latency improvements in the efficiency of the process. Keywords: service level agreement (SLA); customer classification; personalized services; internet of things; automation 1. Introduction Applicable to any paid-for service, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) describes the terms and conditions (T&Cs) associated with the service for which a customer pays. If the service provided does not comply with the T&Cs to which the customer agreed, they will be compensated. SLA provisioning processes for online services from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) are relatively basic in terms of the configuration and personalization options—services are often characterized by the platform uptime, in the sense that the service should be available for a pre-defined percentage of time; otherwise, a customer will be compensated for the service provider’s non-compliance with the SLA. The cost for relying on a service with this platform uptime will be dependent on a service tier selected by a customer; a few tiers on offer will correspond with a bronze, silver, and gold type of offering. While this provides some degree of service differentiation and the ability to propose a service that will respond to a customer’s needs, the existence of such restricted sets of SLA choices can result in a customer accepting a service that may not effectively and efficiently respond to their needs. A customer may, for example, agree to a service tier that provides more capacity than they need in the form of more bandwidth as one example. This may not appear to be a significant problem; however, it also has the negative consequence of a customer paying for more of a service than they will use. From a service provider perspective, it is also a less than optimum business model, with capacity being reserved for customers who will not use it and subsequently being unavailable for customers who would. To contextualize this using a few exemplar SLAs available in practice: EE offers a six-tier home broadband service, with a monthly cost ranging from GBP 24 to GBP 48.50 [1]. Characteristics that distinguish between the services include average download speed (31 Mb/s to 900 Mb/s) and guaranteed minimum speed (18 to 450 Mb/s). Sky offers a Electronics 2023, 12, 1231. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12051231 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics