A genetic based disk scheduling method to decrease makespan and missed tasks

Disk scheduling is an operating system process to service disk requests. It has an important role in QOS guarantee of soft real-time environments such as video-on-demand and multimedia servers. Since now, some disk scheduling algorithms have been proposed to schedule disk requests in an optimized manner. Most of these methods try to minimize makespan by decreasing the number of disk head seeks as one of the slowest operations in modern computers and crucial for system performance because it usually takes some milli-seconds. In this paper, we propose a new disk scheduling method based on genetic algorithm that considers makespan and number of missed tasks simultaneously. In the proposed method, a new coding scheme is presented which employs simple GA procedures such as crossover and mutation and a penalty function in fitness. To get the best performance of the proposed method, its parameters such as number of chromosomes in initial population, mutation, and crossover probabilities, etc have been adjusted by applying it on some sample problems. The algorithm has been tested on several problems and its results were compared with well-known related methods. Experimental results showed that the proposed method worked very well and excelled most related works in terms of miss ratio and average seeks. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.