A Collaborative Task Planning and Development Environment on the Grid

Grid system is a promising solution for sharing distributed resources of registered participants to perform tasks whose demands may exceed the capacity of individual participating organization. However, the collaborative aspect of Grids is still underdeveloped as they lack features and mechanisms for human interaction and collaboration. This paper presents the design and development of a prototype integrated environment for collaborative task planning and workflow development over a Grid. It allows the participants to design their joint workplan interactively and collaboratively in a high level graphical notation. The resulting workplan can be translated into Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for testing and execution in the Grid and forms the basis for further refinement and collaboration. This collaborative Grid environment is a part of our larger Active Assistive Grid infrastructure.