An Effective PSO-inspired Algorithm for Workflow Scheduling

Abstract

The Cloud is a computing platform that provides on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable resources such as networks, servers and storage that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort from clients. At its core, Cloud computing focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of the shared resources. Therefore, workflow scheduling is one of the challenges that the Cloud must tackle especially if a large number of tasks are executed on geographically distributed servers. This entails the need to adopt an effective scheduling algorithm in order to minimize task completion time (makespan). Although workflow scheduling has been the focus of many researchers, a handful efficient solutions have been proposed for Cloud computing. In this paper, we propose the LPSO, a novel algorithm for workflow scheduling problem that is based on the Particle Swarm Optimization method. Our proposed algorithm not only ensures a fast convergence but also prevents getting trapped in local extrema. We ran realistic scenarios using CloudSim and found that LPSO is superior to previously proposed algorithms and noticed that the deviation between the solution found by LPSO and the optimal solution is negligible.