Towards Better Understanding of Two Economic Models: A Grid Perspective

Economic models play a significant role in performance of grid implementation. In this paper, we studied Double auction and Contract-Net-Protocol, which are two of the widely used economic models in grid computing. Economic models facilitate harnessing grid resources across distributed ownerships. However, dynamic nature of these resources imposes further challenge in seamless collaboration. Agent technology is efficient in grid computing due to their autonomous, distributed and collaborative nature. This work models an agent-based economic architecture that supports dynamic management of distributed resources. A simulation environment is designed and implemented for different grid scenarios using the two models and they are later evaluated. We compare our results in terms of job rejection rate, total revenue gained and utilization of idle resources by the market providers. The experimental results predict the effectiveness of using more than one economic model due to various reasons. Our findings would help grid resource providers to decide which model to use at which scenario in order to optimize their designed objectives.