Prospects and Realization of Flexible Service Offers in a Grid Environment

This thesis aims at the process of flexible service offering and negotiation aspects to reach an agreement between service providers and service customers in Grid environments. At first, a general introduction to this process is given to identify the necessity for formal descriptions and work-flow in these processes. For a realization of such processes, concepts of servicebased Grid architectures are analyzed that lead to the Grid Service technology and to special languages for service characteristics, including Service Level Agreement (SLA) parameters and Quality of Service (QoS) issues. The complexity of such service characteristics and their precise realization as services are the main goal of a whole working group of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) which leads the global standardization effort for Grid computing. So the specifications and the work of this Grid Resource Allocation Agreement Protocol (GRAAP) working group are the core of this thesis, enlarged with domain-specific requirements to create several prototypes addressing the switching of network connections. Because this thesis also focuses on a realization of flexible service offers in a Grid environment, many technology frameworks are considered to find the best choice for now. Therefore, this thesis gives an overview of many currently available Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) hosting environments to make a substantiated choice for creating WSRF compliant prototypes. This thesis evolves a WSRF compliant design of an agreement factory and agreement service. There are also interoperable prototypes implemented and discussed but beside this a different approach, concerning the differentiated view of factory and resource is introduced. The complete realization of a working Grid Service application is out of the scope of this thesis. Conclusions sum up the cognitions compiled out of the prototype implementations and future work, concerning security aspects and persistent agreements, is described