An approach for the high-level specification of QoS-aware grid workflows considering location affinity

Many important scientific and engineering problems may be solved by combining multiple applications in the form of a Grid workflow. We consider that for the wide acceptance of Grid technology it is important that the user has the possibility to express requirements on Quality of Service (QoS) at workflow specification time. However, most of the existing workflow languages lack constructs for QoS specification. In this paper we present an approach for high level workflow specification that considers a comprehensive set of QoS requirements. Besides performance related QoS, it includes economical, legal and security aspects. For instance, for security or legal reasons the user may express the location affinity regarding Grid resources on which certain workflow tasks may be executed. Our QoS-aware workflow system provides support for the whole workflow life cycle from specification to execution. Workflow is specified graphically, in an intuitive manner, based on a standard visual modeling language. A set of QoS-aware service-oriented components is provided for workflow planning to support automatic constraint-based service negotiation and workflow optimization. For reducing the complexity of workflow planning, we introduce a QoS-aware workflow reduction technique. We illustrate our approach with a real-world workflow for maxillo facial surgery simulation.