On Adaptability in Grid Systems

With the increasing size and complexity, adaptabihty is among the most badly needed properties in today's Grid systems. Adaptabihty refers to the degree to which adjustments in practices, processes, or structures of systems are possible to projected or actual changes of their environment. In this paper, we review concepts, methods, algorithms, and implementations that are deemed useful for designing adaptable Grid systems, illustrating them with examples. Contrary to the existing literature, the portfolio of the proposed approaches includes unorthodox tools such as game theory. We also discusses methods which have not been fully exploited for purposes of adaptability, such as automated planning or time series analysis. Our inventory is done along the stages of the feedback loop known from control theory. These stages include monitoring, analyzing, predicting, planning, decision taking, and finally executing the plan. Our discussion reveals that several of the problems paving the way to fully adaptable system are of fundamental nature, which makes a 'quantum leap' progress in this area unlikely.