A Genetic Programming-Based Hyper-Heuristic Approach for Multi-Objective Dynamic Workflow Scheduling in Cloud Environment

Abstract

With the popularity of cloud computing, many organizations process their workflow tasks in cloud resources based on the Pay-As-Per-Use model. Dynamic Workflow Scheduling (DWS) aims to allocate dynamically arriving workflow tasks to cloud resources with optimal makespan, cost, load-balancing, etc. To timely allocate arriving tasks, heuristics have been used to solve the DWS problem in cloud environment. However, most of them are manually designed, considering a single objective, and use simple features to allocate resources to workflow tasks. In practice, multiple objectives should be considered to provide trade-off heuristics for users to choose from. In this paper, we propose a genetic programming hyper-heuristic (GPHH) approach to automatically generate multiple heuristics for multi-objective DWS. Our experimental evaluation using benchmark datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed GPHH approach.