Intelligent Ant-Based Solution to the Application Service Partitioning Problem in a Grid Environment

This paper presents a decentralised multi-agent method based the metaphor of foraging intelligent ants, for solving the problem of application service partitioning onto the execution nodes of the grid environment such that all services of the application satisfy some minimum quality requirements. Fundamentally, this is an NP-hard problem. The proposed algorithms have been rigorously tested and evaluated through extensive simulations on randomly generated application services and grid environment. The results show that intelligent ants perform significantly better than what could be achieved with simple unintelligent random ants