SchedSP: a Grid-based application service provider of scheduling solutions

Abstract

In this paper, SchedSP, a middleware framework for providing scheduling solutions as services over the Internet, is presented. Emphasis is given on creating a reusable framework that facilitates the development of specialized clients for the input, output and control interfaces of the various scheduling applications. SchedSP manages the task of preparing and running the required processes and allows the application interface developer to focus on the functionality and efficiency of the interface. The Internet-based scheduling applications created are competitive in all aspects with traditional locally executed applications. In this paper, detailed architecture and implementation details of the SchedSP framework prototype are presented. In addition, the methodology for creating specific case studies based on the SchedSP middleware framework is presented. 1196G. GOULAS, P. ALEFRAGIS AND E. HOUSOS investing in hardware, software and human resources. The ASP offers applications over the Internet for use on its computational resources using a flexible licensing, credit and/or payment scheme. One goal of the ASP approach is to narrow the software requirements on the client side to a Web browser. Such software can be considered as a universal feature, since it is installed automatically in all modern desktop operating systems.In this paper, SchedSP, an Application Service Provision software framework that supports the development of scheduling solutions, is presented. Given the computational requirements of scheduling applications, SchedSP assumes that Grid resources provided by a Computational Infrastructure Service Provider (CISP) are used [1]. An important design goal of SchedSP is to allow favourable scaling on the number of concurrent users and allow for the efficient creation and support of new scheduling applications. The modular design of the SchedSP architecture provides support for the creation, storage and modification of input and output data on the server side. The application interfaces built on top of SchedSP are such that the input and output information can be visualized in a manner similar to the traditional use of a scheduling application on a local computer system. SchedSP also incorporates a set of generic scheduling related components in order to assist the application developers in the creation of their scheduling systems.The initial motivation for SchedSP was to provide the scheduling applications, which have been developed over the years in the Computer Systems Laboratory of the University of Patras, as application services over the Internet. These applications cover problems from several scheduling domains including university timetabling [2], high-school timetabling [3-5], personnel scheduling [6], bus driver scheduling [7], and airline crew scheduling [8][9][10][11].Several published papers discuss various methodologies for the organization and architecture of a service-provisioning framework. In Vinci [12], a service-oriented architecture for supporting the development of Web applications is...

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