Resource Renting for Periodical Cloud Workflow Applications

Cloud computing is a new resource provisioning mechanism, which represents a convenient way for users to access different computing resources. Periodical workflow applications commonly exist in scientific and business analysis, among many other fields. One of the most challenging problems is to determine the right amount of resources for multiple periodical workflow applications. In this paper, the periodical workflow applications scheduling problem with total renting cost minimization is considered. The novelty of this work relies precisely on this objective function, which is more realistic in practice than the more commonly considered makespan minimization. An integer programming model is constructed for the problem under study. A Precedence Tree based Heuristic (PTH) is developed which considers three types of initial schedule construction methods. Based on the initial schedule, two improvement procedures are presented. The proposed methods are compared with existing algorithms for the related makespan based multiple workflow scheduling problem. Experimental and statistical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.