Task Scheduling Using Hamming Particle Swarm Optimization in Distributed Systems

Abstract

An efficient allocation of tasks to the processors is a crucial problem in heterogeneous computing systems. Finding an optimal schedule for such an environment is an NP-complete problem. Near optimal solutions are obtained within a finite duration using heuristics/meta-heuristics are used instead of exact optimization methods. Heuristics and meta-heuristics are the efficient technologies for scheduling tasks in distributed environment because of their ability to deliver high quality solutions in a reasonable time. Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) is a newly developed meta-heuristic computation technique. To enhance the final accuracy and improve the convergence speed of DPSO, this paper presents a modified DPSO algorithm by adjusting its inertia weight based on Hamming distance and also makes a dependency between the two random parameters r_1 and r_2 to control the balance of individual's and collective information in the velocity updating equation. Three criteria such as make span, mean flow time and reliability cost are used to assess the efficiency of the proposed DPSO algorithm for scheduling independent tasks on heterogeneous computing systems. Computational simulations are performed based on a set of benchmark instances to evaluate the performance of the proposed DPSO algorithm compared to existing methods.