Pleiades is developing AURORA, an architecture, enabling dynamic composition of services in open distributed environments. It supports complex coordination and collaboration tasks, allowing advanced network centric applications to be implemented as high-level workflow descriptions, which are instantiated, inspected and manipulated at run time. A related activity is concerned with problems of multi-resource allocation, in dynamic open environments with multiple independent resource manager authorities. Complex units of work require multiple resources, yet the autonomy of the resource managers limits the degree of external control over the allocation process. In particular, it is non-trivial to coordinate the allocation decisions of independent resource managers so as to acquire “bundles” of resources. The AURORA MARKET prototype has been constructed to investigate the performance effects of resource autonomy, in an open market framework where units of work compete for acquiring “service slots” made available by independent resource managers.
