A hybrid multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization for scientific workflow scheduling

TLDR: A non-dominance sort based Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (HPSO) algorithm to handle the workflow scheduling problem with multiple conflicting objective functions on IaaS clouds and the performance of proposed heuristic is compared with state-of-art multi-objective meta-heuristics.

Abstract: Now-a-days, Cloud computing is a technology which eludes provision cost while providing scalability and elasticity to accessible resources on a pay-per-use basis. To satisfy the increasing demand of the computing power to execute large scale scientific workflow applications, workflow scheduling is the main challenging issue in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. As workflow scheduling belongs to NP-complete problem, so, meta-heuristic approaches are more preferred option. Users often specified deadline and budget constraint for scheduling these workflow applications over cloud resources. But these constraints are in conflict with each other, i.e., the cheaper resources are slow as compared to the expensive resources. Most of the existing studies try to optimize only one of the objectives, i.e., either time minimization or cost minimization under user specified Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. But due to the complexity of workflows and dynamic nature of cloud, a trade-off solution is required to make a balance between execution time and processing cost. To address these issues, this paper presents a non-dominance sort based Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (HPSO) algorithm to handle the workflow scheduling problem with multiple conflicting objective functions on IaaS clouds. The proposed algorithm is a hybrid of our previously proposed Budget and Deadline constrained Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (BDHEFT) algorithm and multi-objective PSO. The HPSO heuristic tries to optimize two conflicting objectives, namely, makespan and cost under the deadline and budget constraints. Along with these two conflicting objectives, energy consumed of created workflow schedule is also minimized. The proposed algorithm gives a set of Pareto Optimal solutions from which the user can choose the best solution. The performance of proposed heuristic is compared with state-of-art multi-objective meta-heuristics like NSGA-II, MOPSO, and e -FDPSO. The simulation analysis substantiates that the solutions obtained with proposed heuristic deliver better convergence and uniform spacing among the solutions as compared to others. Hence it is applicable to solve a wide class of multi-objective optimization problems for scheduling scientific workflows over IaaS clouds.