From Market-driven Agents to Market-Oriented Grids.pdf

From Market-driven Agents to Market-oriented Grids (Position Paper) KWANG MONG SIM Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan. Email: kmsim@.tw ________________________________________________________________________ Providing efficient mechanism for allocation and management of resources is essential for realizing a computational grid. Since resource providers and consumers may be independent bodies in a computing grid platform, negotiation among these participants is necessary. This position paper discusses (i) the design considerations of e-negotiation agents for grid commerce, and (ii) the possible application of Market-driven agents (MDAs) as negotiation mechanisms for managing resources in a computational grid. MDAs are negotiation agents designed with the flexibility of (i) making adjustable amounts of concession taking into account factors such as market rivalry, time preferences, and outside options, and (ii) relaxing trade expectation in the face of intense pressure. In addition to having stable strategies, making prudent compromises and optimizing utility, additional desirable properties of MDAs that are suitable for a computational grid include: adaptivity to changes in market conditions, and flexibility of reaching faster consensus. Additional Key Words and Phrases: automated negotiation, Grid-commerce, resource allocation. __________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION The rapid development of grid and peer-to-peer computing provides enabling technologies for bolstering virtual enterprises in sharing geographically distributed resources. In a computational grid [1], one envisions ‘software applications “plugging” into a “power grid” of computational resources drawing upon the necessary computing resources from the global supply for their executions’ [2]. While there are much attention focusing on the software mechanism and so