On the flexibility of WS-agreement for job submission

This paper considers extensions to the WS-Agreement specification, namely the Guarantee Terms of WS-Agreement [1]. Experiences and conclusions drawn are in the context of Agreement-based job management systems. A key idea of these extensions is the use of functions for the Guarantee Terms of the Agreement rather than constant values or ranges. Functions may contain variables defined in a particular agreement or be drawn from the known set of reference variables, such as wall-clock time, job start time, etc. We show that such an approach can potentially reduce the negotiation overheads associated with job renegotiation and/or reduce the number of failed agreements.