A Comprehensive Semantic-Based Resource Allocation Framework for Workflow Management Systems

Resource allocation that targets to assign the appropriate resource to the dynamically generated work item has always been a critical issue in the workflow management system research. However, today’s workflow systems almost still depend on the static literal-based matchmaking mechanism to support the resource allocation, which would suffer greatly from the diversity and mutability of resources in current open and dynamic network environment. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive semantic-based resource allocation framework to enhance the matchmaking process. The essential contributions of this framework are: firstly, an OWL ontology is provided to describe available resources based on their semantic information. Secondly, based on the ontology, effective semantic reasoning techniques are used to select the eligible resource candidates. Thirdly, a bidding approach is adopted to further optimize the resource selection according to runtime conditions such as availability, cost and etc., which would typically overcome the inflexibility of the static assignment policy in previous study. With these ontology modelling, semantic matchmaking and bidding mechanism, our framework provides better resource allocation functionality.