Semantic-Based On-demand Synthesis of Grid Activities for Automatic Workflow Generation

On-demand synthesis of grid activities can play a significant role in automatic workflow composition and in improving quality of the grid resource provisioning. However, in the grid, synthesis of activities has been largely ignored due to the limited expressiveness of the representation of activity capabilities and the lack of adapted resource management means to take advantage of such activity synthesis. This paper introduces a new mechanism for automatic synthesis of available activities in the grid by applying ontology rules. Rule-based synthesis combines multiple primitive activities to form new compound activities. The synthesized activities can be provisioned as new or alternative options for negotiation as well as advance reservation. This is a major advantage compared to other approaches that only focus on resource matching and brokerage. Furthermore, the new synthesized activities provide aggregated capabilities that otherwise may not be possible, leading towards an automatic generation of grid workflows. We developed a prototype to demonstrate advantages of our approach.