Agent technology and scientific workflow management in an e-Science environment

Abstract

In e-Science environments, scientific workflow management systems (SWMS) hide the integration details among Grid resources and allow scientists to prototype an experimental computing system at a high level of abstraction. However, the development of an effective SWMS requires profound knowledge on both application domains and the network programming, and is often time consuming. Agent technologies provide suitable solutions to decompose the control intelligence of flow execution and to encapsulate distributed e-Science resources. The work presented in this paper is conducted in the context of the Dutch Virtual Laboratory for e-Science (VL-e) project. Agent technologies are proposed to realise generic workflow support.