Cooperative design in grid services

Quite often workflow control and computational power are not available for engineers and scientists either due to the availability of resources which can be exacerbated by the lack of process controls or the amount of data produced. The availability of grid services (e.g. GT3) presents a potential feasible method to overcome the barriers of sharing heterogeneous computational resources. However, lack of sophisticated coordination mechanisms to specify the workflow would deter the prevailing of the grid services. There is a need for a seamless, flexible, demand based service for engineers/scientists who are able to submit jobs to a computational grid from a remote source in a manner that would ensure the job is executed in an efficient, controlled method. The authors propose a system that adopts BPEL4WS as a coordination language to define and manage the workflow among grid services to meet engineering requirements. A prototype system is built and evaluated with a case study from the automotive industry to demonstrate the feasibilities of the proposed system.