Mutation and dynamic objective-based farmland fertility algorithm for workflow scheduling in the cloud

Nowadays, many scientific applications are deployed in the cloud to execute at a lower cost. However, the growing scale of workflows makes scheduling problems challenging. To minimize the workflow execution cost under deadline constraints, this article proposes a Mutation and Dynamic Objective-based Farmland Fertility (MDO-FF) algorithm for obtaining a near-optimal solution within a relatively shorter time. A Dynamic Objective Strategy (DOS) is introduced to accelerate the convergence speed, while a multi-swarm evolutionary approach and mutation strategies are incorporated to enhance the search diversity and help to escape from local optima. By seeking new potential solutions and searching in its corresponding neighborhoods, our proposed MDO-FF can make a good trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Extensive experiments are conducted on well-known scientific workflows with different types and sizes. The experimental results demonstrate that in most cases, our MDO-FF outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of constraint satisfiability and solution quality.