This project seeks to carry out the fundamental computer science research that is necessary to support the entire virtual organisation (VO) lifecycles as it exists for the e-science.
This involves dealing with the following main challenges:
As our solution, we adopt a service-oriented view of e-Science applications in which the individual computational entities are agents. These agents offer a variety of services to one another and the agents negotiate with one another to determine the terms and conditions under which they can gain access to the services. These inter-related services form a VO. An agent can participate in one or more VOs by sharing some or all of its resources.
The underpinning technologies that assemble, manage, monitor and adjust the VO can be generic. In particular, we have focused on the issue of coalition formation and used this as the basis for forming effective VOs.