Patent ID: 8656403

Claim:
An automated method of negotiating for resources in a data processing system, wherein the data processing system comprises multiple sites, the method comprising a negotiation management component of a computer system at a given one of the sites performing the steps of: obtaining one or more tasks from at least one source of one or more plans, each plan being annotated with one or more needed resources and one or more potential resource providers at one or more sites in the data processing system; computing an optimized resource negotiation schedule based on the one or more obtained tasks, wherein the schedule comprises an optimized order in which resources are negotiated and wherein the optimized order is determined by computation of a function which minimizes a negotiation cost value while maximizing a scheduling utility value, wherein minimizing the negotiation cost value includes consideration of a negotiation time for getting a resource; in accordance with the optimized resource negotiation schedule, sending a request for each needed resource to the one or more potential resource providers such that a negotiation process is performed between the negotiation management component and at least one of the potential resource providers; wherein the step of computing the optimized resource negotiation schedule further comprises performing a voting-based methodology in accordance with a given resource set, wherein the voting-based methodology utilizes an algorithm wherein a scheduling deadline is a maximum time the algorithm can run; and wherein the voting-based methodology further comprises searching on a subset of the given resource set and deriving the optimized resource negotiation schedule for the given resource set based on a result of searching the subset.