Provisioning quality-aware social compute units in the cloud

Abstract

To date, on-demand provisioning models of human-based services in the cloud are mainly used to deal with simple human tasks solvable by individual compute units (ICU). In this paper, we propose a framework allowing the provisioning of a group of people as an execution service unit, a so-called Social Compute Unit (SCU), by utilizing clouds of ICUs. Our model allows service consumers to specify quality requirements, which contain constraints and objectives with respect to skills, connectedness, response time, and cost. We propose a solution model for tackling the problem in quality-aware SCUs provisioning and employ some metaheuristic techniques to solve the problem. A prototype of the framework is implemented, and experiments using data from simulated clouds and consumers are conducted to evaluate the model. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.