Title
Utility Driven Adaptive Work?ow Execution
Abstract
Workflows are widely used in applications that require coordinated use of computational resources. Workflow definition languages typically abstract over some aspects of the way in which a workflow is to be executed, such as the level of parallelism to be used or the physical resources to be deployed. As a result, a workflow management system has responsibility for establishing how best to map tasks within a workflow to the available resources. As workflows are typically run over shared resources, and thus face unpredictable and changing resource capabilties, there may be benefit to be derived from adapting the task-to-resource mapping while a workflow is executing. This paper describes the use of utility functions to express the relative merits of alternative mappings; in essence, a utility function can be used to give a score to a candidate mapping, and the exploration of alternative mappings can be cast as an optimization problem. In this approach, changing the utility function allows adaptations to be carried out with a view to meeting different objectives. The contributions of this paper include: (i) a description of how adaptive workflow execution can be expressed as an optimization problem where the objective of the adaptation is to maximize some property expressed as a utility function; (ii) a description of how the approach has been applied to support adaptive workflow execution in grids; and (iii) an experimental evaluation of the resulting approach for alternative utility measures based on response time and profit.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/CCGRID.2009.15
CCGrid
Keywords
Field
DocType
grid computing,optimisation,scheduling,workflow management software,alternative mappings,computational resources,optimization problem,utility driven adaptive workflow execution,utility functions,workflow management system,adaptive,rescheduling,workflows
Resource management,Workflow technology,Grid computing,Computer science,Real-time computing,Workflow engine,Application software,Workflow,Workflow management system,Optimization problem,Distributed computing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.59
18
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kevin Lee134027.53
Norman W. Paton23059359.26
Rizos Sakellariou31679129.85
Alvaro A. A. Fernandes490477.71