Business relationships in grid workflows

Abstract

Although initially designed to cover the needs of computationally-intensive applications, Grid technology of nowadays aims at providing an infrastructure that can also serve the needs of the business domain. Taking into consideration that the available service providers may have business / strategic relationships, this paper focuses on describing an approach for modeling these relationships. Furthermore and since these relationships may affect the parameters regarding the offered Quality of Service (QoS) level, we present a metric for characterizing a service providers "friendliness". The latter can be used to promote the most positively influential providers and put aside those with a negative influence during a QoS-based selection process in Grid workflow management systems. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.