BPEL4WS-based coordination of Grid Services in design

Engineers and scientists often do not have access to workflow control or sufficient computational resources, either due to limited resource availability and lack of process controls, or because of the quantity of data produced. The availability of Grid Services (e.g. GT3) presents a potentially feasible method to overcome the barriers of sharing heterogeneous computational resources. However, a lack of sophisticated coordination mechanisms for specifying workflow deters the widespread adoption of Grid Services. There is a need for a seamless, flexible, demand-based service to enable engineers and scientists to submit jobs to a computational Grid from remote sources in a manner that ensures that jobs are executed in an efficient, controlled method. In this paper, we propose a system that adopts Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) as a coordination language to define and manage workflow among Grid Services to meet engineering requirements. A prototype system is built and evaluated with a case study from the automotive industry to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.