A multi-objective grey-wolf optimization based approach for scheduling on cloud platforms

Abstract

A cloud computing environment processes user workloads or tasks by exploiting its high performance computational, storage, of reducing and network resources. The virtual machines in the cloud environment are allocated to tasks with the aim of reducing overall execution time. The use of high performance resources incurs monetary costs, as well as high power consumption. The heuristic based approaches implemented for scheduling tasks are unable to cope with the complexity of optimizing multiple parameters. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective grey-wolf optimization based algorithm for scheduling tasks on cloud platforms. The proposed algorithm targets to minimize schedule length (overall execution time), energy consumption, and monetary cost required for executing tasks. For optimization, the algorithm incorporates steps that are performed iteratively for mimicking the behavior of grey wolves attacking their prey. It uses discrete values for positioning wolves for encircling and attacking the prey. The assignment of tasks to virtual machines is performed using the solution found after multi-objective optimization that incorporates weighted sorting for arranging solutions. Our experimentation performed using the CloudSim framework shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms with performance improvement ranging from 3.98% to 16.07%, while considering the schedule length, monetary cost, and energy consumption.