A Model-driven Approach for Grid Services Engineering

As a consequence to the hype of Grid computing, such systems have seldom been designed using formal techniques. The complexity and rapidly growing demand around Grid technologies has favour the use of classical development techniques, resulting in no guidelines or rules and unstructured engineering processes. This paper advocates a formal approach to Grid applications development in an effort to contribute to the rigorous development of Grids software architectures. This approach addresses cross-platform interoperability and quality of service; the model-driven paradigm is applied to a formal architecture-centric engineering method in order to benefit from the formal semantic description power in addition to model-based transformations. The result of such a novel combined concept promotes the re-use of design models and eases developments in Grid computing by providing an adapted development process and ensuring correctness at each design step.