Open source grows when people can see where their work belongs and who they can
build with. vLLM Semantic Router now has seven Workgroups, each responsible for
one durable technical direction.

If you are new to the project, start here: vLLM Semantic Router sits between an
AI application and its model or agent backends. It understands the request,
chooses how it should be handled, executes that route, and measures the result.
The Workgroups divide that system into clear places to contribute.
One System, Seven Clear Owners
A routed request crosses several responsibilities:
- Developer Experience & Ecosystem provides the CLI, Dashboard, APIs,
recipes, and learning path.
- Enterprise & Environment secures management surfaces and owns lifecycle,
capacity, and deployment policy.
- Router Models & Inference Runtime produces the signals used to route.
- MoM & Routing chooses models and multi-model strategies.
- Agentic & Context manages bounded context, memory, and session continuity.
- Data Plane & Networking executes the chosen path.
- Evaluation & Quality measures results and catches regressions.
They form one system, separated by responsibility rather than isolated code
ownership. Every Epic in the live views below has one owning Workgroup.
Dependencies on other groups are recorded as shared interfaces in the linked
charter.
Choose the direction that matches the problem you want to solve. GitHub labels
on each linked Epic are the source of truth for acceptance and delivery status.
Mission: Make a pool of models behave like one measurable and improving
Mixture-of-Models.

The problem
A user should be able to call one stable model name without choosing a backend
for every request. A Mixture-of-Models (MoM) needs a qualified model pool and a
versioned recipe that can improve without making behavior unpredictable.
What this Workgroup owns
- Model pools, model roles, portable recipes, and their versioned lifecycle.
- Model selection and collaboration through fallback, cascade, judging,
synthesis, and bounded workflows.
- Offline-to-online improvement of recipes and pool members against explicit
quality, cost, latency, safety, domain, or modality objectives.
- Modality-aware pools, approved reasoning reuse, and safe reuse of compatible
computation across models.
What it does not own
This Workgroup does not train the lightweight models that produce routing
signals, build the live network path, decide how conversation history is
compressed, or operate a hosted service.
Owned Epics
View all current MoM & Routing Epics
Mission: Build better Router Models and one extensible runtime for
executing them across the ecosystem.

The problem
Routing depends on signals such as intent, complexity, safety, preference, and
expected quality. The models that produce those signals must improve over time,
and new models should not spread engine-specific code throughout the Router.
What this Workgroup owns
- Improve, calibrate, and release the Router Models built into the project.
- Develop routing-native model families beyond BERT-only designs.
- Build reproducible self-improvement, distillation, and fine-tuning pipelines.
- Provide one versioned execution contract across supported engines and
hardware, with clear activation, diagnostics, and rollback.
What it does not own
This Workgroup produces routing intelligence; it does not choose the end-user
MoM pool, own generic gateway forwarding, secure management surfaces, or rebuild
the tensor engines and GPU schedulers it integrates with.
Owned Epics
View all current Router Models & Inference Runtime Epics
Mission: Execute every live routing decision through a fast, reliable,
and portable request path.

The problem
A routing decision has little value if the request path is slow, fragile, or
different in every deployment. Standalone serving and gateway integration need
the same behavior and failure semantics.
What this Workgroup owns
- Standalone OpenAI-compatible serving and Envoy or gateway integrations.
- Request, response, streaming, dispatch, retry, fallback, error, and telemetry
behavior.
- Engine-neutral backend connectivity and inference-aware endpoint selection.
- Safe semantic caching, performance optimization, and failure recovery.
What it does not own
This Workgroup executes request-path networking and deployment-provided access
policy, but it does not define management identity and authorization, decide
which hardware is officially supported, train Router Models, or choose the best
MoM recipe.
Owned Epics
View all current Data Plane & Networking Epics
Mission: Make vLLM Semantic Router production-grade across supported
environments and hardware.

The problem
Production operators need clear answers to practical questions: Which
management surfaces are protected, and by which provider-backed identity? What
changed? Is the system healthy? Can a model, recipe, or Router upgrade be rolled
out and reversed safely? Which deployment path is maintained, and which
components does it own? The answers must remain consistent across deployment
environments.
What this Workgroup owns
- Management authentication, provider-backed identity integration, route-bound
authorization, input and credential boundaries, and durable audit.
- Reliability, scalability, monitoring, diagnostics, and the existing Insights
and operational surfaces.
- Model, recipe, configuration, and vLLM-SR activation, rollout, and rollback.
- Workload simulation and capacity planning that connect observed traffic,
routing behavior, serving topology, and calibrated hardware profiles to
reviewable deployment proposals.
- Stable deployment and lifecycle APIs, maintained reference stacks, and a
tested support matrix across deployment environments and hardware.
What it does not own
This Workgroup does not build organization, team, or project administration;
virtual API keys; tenant quotas, token rate limits, budgets, billing, or usage
settlement. It also does not plan routing analytics beyond the existing
Insights and operational surfaces.
It does not promise a public hosted-service SLA, expose private infrastructure
or credentials, define model quality, own evaluation standards, or implement
networking protocols. It supplies reusable open-source production capabilities
rather than publishing private product plans.
Owned Epics
View all current Enterprise & Environment Epics
Mission: Optimize bounded context, memory, session continuity, and safe
model or workflow switching for long-running workloads.

The problem
Long-running work accumulates messages, memory, tool output, cost, and risk.
Important instructions can be lost, and model or workflow changes can break
tool loops or provider state. The Router needs bounded continuity contracts
without becoming a general-purpose agent framework.
What this Workgroup owns
- Context compression, pruning, memory selection, prompt restructuring, and
protection of critical instructions.
- Prompt-visible Router Memory with explicit persistence and lifecycle receipts.
- Session budgets, state boundaries, retention, tool-loop continuity, recovery,
and graceful degradation.
- Safe model or workflow switching as a session evolves.
- Typed task, context-portability, capability, and collaboration receipts that
external agent runtimes can consume.
What it does not own
This Workgroup does not select, invoke, host, or compose agent endpoints inside
the Router. It does not build an agent endpoint catalog, unrestricted agent
orchestrator, tool platform, or workflow engine; own general MoM selection;
transport KV caches; or allow silent lossy transformation and unbounded online
training.
Owned Epics
View all current Agentic & Context Epics
Mission: Make vLLM Semantic Router easy to adopt, configure, extend,
diagnose, and contribute to.

The problem