TY - JOUR AB - Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss an adaptive SLA mechanism for service sharing in virtual environment, which can organize and govern QoS items in terms of service execution time, reliability, and availability, and provides a common understanding about services, responsibilities, priorities, guarantees and warranties-related virtual cooperative issues.Design/methodology/approach The management framework for SLA is introduced, based on which the whole process including SLA contract, adaptive SLA negotiation strategy, SLA deployment and SLA assessment are discussed, and the prototype is implemented in the cloud manufacturing platform.Findings A proposed SLA framework for service sharing in virtual environments is given; electronic contracts are designed in the framework for encapsulating measurable aspects of service level agreements so as to provide common understanding about the service; and an improved SLA negotiation strategy with three phases is presented for the dynamicity of the virtual services.Originality/value The paper presents a very useful adaptive SLA mechanism for service sharing in virtual environments that can be utilized in concurrent or future advanced manufacturing modes. VL - 45 IS - 7 SN - 0368-492X DO - 10.1108/K-03-2014-0057 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/K-03-2014-0057 AU - Yin Yong AU - Zhou Jian AU - Zhang Chaoyong AU - Chen Dejun PY - 2016 Y1 - 2016/01/01 TI - Adaptive SLA mechanism for service sharing in virtual environments T2 - Kybernetes PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 1036 EP - 1051 Y2 - 2024/04/24 ER -