What is Agent-Based Systems

The need for a dynamic and scalable expansion of the grid infrastructure and resources and other scalability issues in terms of execution efficiency and fault tolerance present centralized management techniques with numerous difficulties. This chapter presents the case for biologically inspired grid resource management techniques that are decentralized and self organized in nature. To achieve the desired de-centralized resource management, these techniques model the self-organization observed in many natural complex adaptive systems. Using a few representative techniques, the authors review the literature on Bio-inspired Grid Resource Management. Based on this review the authors conclude that many such techniques have been successfully applied to resource discovery, service placement, scheduling and load balancing.