MCDA & Agents: Supporting Effective Resource Federation in Virtual Organizations Pavlos Delias and Nikolaos Matsatsinis May 7, 2012 Abstract A Virtual Organization is a linkage of organizations where participants contribute resources for mutual exploitation. A critical issue to reach cooperative resource federation is a transparent sharing strategy as well as load balancing. An equivalent situation in the case of Grid computing, where the shared resources are computing resources. In this work we propose an multi-agent, multiple criteria approach to support the design of such a strategy. In particular, the proposed methodology pointedly supports the decision about which application environments should be hosted in an IaaS cloud computing context, in order not only to have an efficient and cost effective data center, but to satisfy the collective preferences of all parties as much as possible. Through the text, the advantages of adopting the MCDA paradigm when designing multi-agent systems are revealed. 1 Introduction A Virtual Organization (VO) is a linkage of organizations, which share some of their resources to achieve their individual goals. A common instantiation of this practice is the case of Grid computing [6] where the shared resources are computing resources. Trying to create a rich resource pool by aggregating the participants’ resources is called resource federation. To this end, and in order to continuously manage the resources, formally defined resource sharing strategies are needed to guide the decisions and actions of individuals or groups. This task is left to the VO administrator who is responsible for the resource allocation. Even in the case of the Grid, it is common for resources to be managed on a central approach basis, by local resource management systems such as Condor [10] and PBS [1]. Every participant has different interests and aims (self-interest) when con- tributing resources to a VO, and much effort and time are spent to generate a mutual acceptance between VO administrator and participants who demand for access in a particular resource. There should be strategies to support the cooperative resource federation and to facilitate transparent sharing and load 1