Modeling a resource contention in the management of virtual organizations

A virtual organization provides a cost-efficient method allowing different autonomous entities, such as organizations, departments and individuals, to extend service offerings in a virtual marketplace. To support cost-efficient service provisioning, a suitable procedure must be applied to determine the amount of resources necessary for the operation of virtual organizations. We propose a new mathematical model for a quantitative performance evaluation of resource management in virtual organizations. We present an efficient algorithm to determine the steady state probabilities and the performance measures of the system. A comparison with a detailed simulation model and other numerical approaches shows that the proposed algorithm is fast and accurate. This algorithm can therefore be used for resource dimensioning to support the cost-efficient operation of virtual organizations. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.