Project holding the main results of my agent-based scheduling framework combining a series of technologies (part of my PhD work between 2008-2011).

The Agent Scheduling Framework (ASF) provides a decentralized method for scheduling tasks and self-heal. It is based on Feedback Control Loops that govern the previous two functionalities.

It relies on my own OSyRIS workflow engine based on a nature inspired paradigm (chemical reactions was the kickstarter) to execute the scheduling algorithms and RabbitMQ for handling messages between components. The source code for OSyRIS can be found in its own repository. Here I have included the compiled jar file (lib/ folder) together with some example files used by ASF during the scheduling and negotiation (rules/ folder).

The platform has been presented in various conferences. See below for a selected list:

• M. Frincu, N. Villegas, D. Petcu, H. Muller, R. Ruvoy, Self-Healing Distributed Scheduling Platform, Procs. IEEE/ACM CCGrid, 2011.
• M. Frincu, D. Petcu, OSyRIS: a Nature Inspired Workflow Engine for Service Oriented Environments, Scalable Computing Practice and Experience, vol. 11(1), 2010.

The project was a proof of concept demonstrating self-healing in an agent-based distributed platform and should be treated accordingly. It combines various technologies and concepts I found interesting during my PhD studies and worth further exploring.

The file asf-todo contains some of my plans for further improving the prototype and which I never got the time to do.

The class structure is as follows:

• agent/ - contains Agent.java which models a platform agent
• modules/ contains classes for defining the main agent modules
  • communication/ contains AMQP communication classes
    • json/ contains classes for (d)ecoding JSON messages sent via AMQP
• network/ - contains MulticastClient for broadcasting multicast messages used to identify remote available resources
• runner/ - contains RunModule which is used to start modules in case of failures
• services/ - contains classes for accessing agent/task/resource information from a database. The example uses PostgresQL but can be any other database as long as it uses the provided service interfaces
• settings/ - contains classes for setting up the platform and for logging
• simulator/ - contains Failures.java which is used to simulate module failures.
• test/ - contains various classes for testing the functionality of various platform components
• utils/ - contains other utility classes such as classes for accessing HDFS and for copying/deploying the agent archive to a remote location

GPL - please see the accompanying gpl-3.0.txt file

The Scheduling Platform was developed as part of the European FP7-ICT project mOSAIC grant no. 256910, at the e-Austria Research Institute in Timisoara Romania. For any questions/remarks feel free to contact me.

• Java 1.6 or newer
• Additional libraries come bundled with the package
• Ant utility
• RRabbitMQ 3.0.2 or later
• Hadoop
• Postgresql 8.4 or later

ant dist

NOTE: once ant is run you will see a dist/ folder containing all the necessary files to run the platform.

The files already contain a simple example.

NOTE: by default the agent token is 26853a29-0073-4ab8-b3ad-5aacf442d0f5 and located in the agent.token file.

cd dist java -jar asf-engine_{TIMESTAMP}.jar deploy.json

You can view the trace in the Postgres table 'trace' or in the log file asf.log from the dist/26853a29-0073-4ab8-b3ad-5aacf442d0f5/ folder.

ALTERNATIVELY you can start the platform one module at a time by using either Eclipse or the command line:

runner.RunModule HEALING FALSE -1 localhost true FALSE asf.tar executor.sh

The arguments are explained in the runner.RunModule class. You can have either HEALING, SCHEDULING, NEGOTIATION or EXECUTOR as first argument depending on the module type.