Community Research and Development Information Service - CORDIS

The goal of the RESERVOIR project is to increase the competitiveness of the EU economy by introducing a powerful ICT infrastructure for reliable and effective delivery of services as utilities, analogously to electricity and telephony. This infrastructure will support the setup and deployment of services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, assuring quality of service. In doing so, RESERVOIR will lay a foundation for a service-based European online economy, where services - which have become critical to our business environment - are transparently, scalably and flexibly provisioned and managed for the benefit of businesses and citizens.

The prime deliverable of the project will be an architecture and a reference implementation of a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) which "building on open standards and new technologies" will provide a dependable framework for delivering services as utilities. We will demonstrate how this infrastructure supports the deployment of complex service scenarios that are not otherwise supported by today's technology. We aim to achieve quantified and significant improvements in service delivery productivity, quality, availability and cost.

From a scientific standpoint, our work will contribute to the state-of-the-art by:
- Significantly advancing virtualisation and grid technologies and deeply integrating them, thereby creating a basis for the next generation SOI, where services and their associated resources are effectively delivered "without boundaries" of geography and configuration.
- Developing service management technology capable of exploiting the strengths and addressing the challenges presented by our infrastructure, e.g. monitoring service execution and resource utilization, and triggering service relocation and resource reallocation decisions as needed to assure compliance with Service Level Agreements across disparate domains.