Task scheduling in cloud computing based on grey wolf optimization with a new encoding mechanism

Task scheduling in the cloud computing still remains challenging in terms of performance. Several evolutionary- derived algorithms have been proposed to solve or alleviate this problem. However, evolutionary algorithms have good exploration ability, but the performance drops significantly in high dimensions. To address this issue, considering the characteristic of task scheduling in cloud computing (i.e. all task-VM mappings are 1-dimensional and have the same search range), we propose a task scheduling algorithm based on grey wolf optimization using a new encoding mechanism (GWOEM) in this work. Through this new encoding mechanism, greedy and evolutionary algorithms are rationally integrated in GWOEM. Besides, based on the new mechanism, the dimension of search space is reduced to 1 and the key parameter (i.e., the population size) is eliminated. We apply the proposed GWOEM to the Google Cloud Jobs dataset (GoCJ) and demonstrate better performance than the prior state of the art in terms of makespan.