Operating Virtual Organizations using Bipartite Service Level Agreements

Virtual Organizations are evolving as a means of inter-domain collaboration. The reason for building Virtual Organizations can be summarized as sharing resources and enabling collaboration between service providers from different organizational units. Within this paper we will show that bipartite Service Level Agreements can be used as a basic principle for the management and operation of Virtual Organizations. We show that our approach to build Virtual Organizations on top of bipartite Service Level Agreements leads to agile and dynamic Virtual Organizations, in contrast to most of the well-established models which regard Virtual Organizations as rather static in nature.