Formation of virtual organizations in grids: a game-theoretic approach

Applications require the composition of resources to execute in a grid computing environment. The Grid Service Providers (GSPs), the owners of the computational resources, must form Virtual Organizations (VOs) to be able to provide the composite resource. We consider grids as self-organizing systems composed of autonomous, selfinterested GSPs that will organize themselves into VOs with every GSP having the objective of maximizing its profit. Using game theory, we formulate the resource composition among GSPs as a coalition formation problem and propose a framework to model and solve it. Using this framework, we propose a resource management system that supports the VO formation among GSPs in a grid computing system.