A Genetic Algorithm for Cost-Aware Business Processes Execution in the Cloud

With the generalization of the Cloud, software providers can distribute their software as a service without investing in large infrastructure. However, without an effective resource allocation method, their operation cost can grow quickly, hindering the profitability of the service. This is the case for BPM as a Service providers that want to handle hundreds of customers with a given quality of service. Since there are variations in the needed load and in the number of users of the service, the allocation and scheduling methods must be able to adjust the cloud resource quantity and size, and the distribution of customers on these resources. In this paper, we present a cost optimization model and an heuristic based on genetic algorithms to adjust resource allocation to the needs of a set of customers with varying BPM task throughput. Experimentations using realistic customer loads and cloud resources capacities show the gain of these methods compared to previous approaches. Results show that using our algorithm on split groups of customers can provide even better results.