A genetic algorithm with communication costs to schedule workflows on a SOA-grid

Abstract

In this paper we study the problem of scheduling a collection of workflows, identical or not, on a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) grid. A workflow (job) is represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with typed tasks. All of the grid hosts are able to process a set of typed tasks with unrelated processing costs and are able to transmit files through communication links for which the communication times are not negligible. The goal of our study is to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan) of the workflows. To solve this problem we propose a genetic approach. The contributions of this paper are both the design of a Genetic Algorithm taking the communication costs into account and its performance analysis. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.