Service level agreement management in federated virtual organizations

The present emergence of loosely-coupled, inter-enterprise collaboration, i.e., virtual organizations calls for new kind of middleware: generic, common facilities for managing contract-governed collaborations and the autonomous business services between which those collaborations are formed. While further work is still needed on the functional governance of the collaborations and services, even more work is awaiting on the management of non-functional aspects of the virtual enterprises and their members. In this paper, languages and architectures for service level agreement between Web Services are discussed and the maturity of the service level management solutions is reflected against the needs of federated virtual organizations.