Workflow management system

Workflow technology

Divide and conquer algorithms

Database

Scheduling (production processes)

Mathematics

Mathematical optimization

Operating system

Workflow

Computer science

Cloud computing

Algorithm

Distributed computing

Journal of Cloud Computing Advances Systems and Applications

A workflow is an effective way for modeling complex applications and serves as a means for scientists and researchers to better understand the details of applications. Cloud computing enables the running of workflow applications on many types of computational resources which become available on-demand. As one of the most important aspects of cloud computing, workflow scheduling needs to be performed efficiently to optimize resources. Due to the existence of various resource types at different prices, workflow scheduling has evolved into an even more challenging problem on cloud computing. The present paper proposes a workflow scheduling algorithm in the cloud to minimize the execution cost of the deadline-constrained workflow. The proposed method, EDQWS, extends the current authors’ previous study (DQWS) and is a two-step scheduler based on divide and conquer. In the first step, the workflow is divided into sub-workflows by defining, scheduling, and removing a critical path from the workflow, similar to DQWS. The process continues until only chain-structured sub-workflows, called linear graphs, remain. In the second step which is linear graph scheduling, a new merging algorithm is proposed that combines the resulting linear graphs so as to reduce the number of used instances and minimize the overall execution cost. In addition, the current work introduces a scoring function to select the most efficient instances for scheduling the linear graphs. Experiments show that EDQWS outperforms its competitors, both in terms of minimizing the monetary costs of executing scheduled workflows and meeting user-defined deadlines. Furthermore, in more than 50% of the examined workflow samples, EDQWS succeeds in reducing the number of resource instances compared to the previously introduced DQWS method.

EDQWS: an enhanced divide and conquer algorithm for workflow scheduling in cloud