Applications of intelligent agent technology to the grid

Summary form only given. Grids are a distributed computing technology whose objective is to provide the basic mechanisms for forming and operating dynamic distributed collaborations, or virtual organizations as they are sometimes called. While grid infrastructure has focused on such things as the means for discovering and monitoring dynamic services, managing faults and failures, creating and managing service level agreements, creating and enforcing dynamic policy, to name a few - to date, only limited progress has been made on creating the higher level reactive behaviors that would enable truly dynamic formation of virtual organizations. What is needed are the basic algorithms that enable independently operating entities to interact with one another with partial knowledge and have emerge a robust desirable behavior. This is exactly the range of problems that are being addressed by intelligent agent technologies. Hence, it seems likely that agent technology plays an important role in the development of the grid as a pervasive infrastructure and the grid offers an exciting range of applications for agents. In This work the author explores the relationship of intelligent agents to the grid and in particular focus on how agent technology can be applied to some specific challenges faced by grid infrastructure and applications.