Grid resource commercialization: economic engineering and delivery scenarios

In this chapter we consider the architectural steps needed to commercialize Grid resources as technical focus shifts towards business requirements. These requirements have been met for conventional utilities resources through commoditization, a variety of market designs, customized contract design, and decision support. Decision support is needed to exploit the flexibility provided by Grids in the context of uncertain and dynamic user requirements and resource prices. We provide a detailed example of how the decision support for users can be formulated as a multi-stage stochastic optimization problem. We derive required architectural features for commercialization using inspiration from conventional utilities and considering the delivery context of Grid resources. We consider two basic delivery scenarios: a group of peers and a group with an external provider. In summary, we provide a conceptual framework for Grid resource commercialization including both the understanding of the underlying resource commodity characteristics and also the delivery context.