Ant-Based Approach to the Quality Aware Application Service Partitioning in a Grid Environment

This paper presents the first ant system based approach to the problem of configuring an application seen as a service composition on a distributed grid execution platform. The service set is to be partitioned onto the available execution nodes such that they satisfy some minimum quality requirements. Fundamentally this is an NP-hard problem. This paper explores the metaphor of foraging unintelligent ants of an ant colony, and model a de-centralised multi-agent method for solving the service partitioning problem. Moreover this approach establishes a distributed problem solving mechanism which does not require to have a central control. Simulations show that this is a viable approach for configuring applications in a grid environment.