Budget-aware Scheduling Algorithm Using Negative Offset Mechanism for Snake Optimization in Heterogeneous Cloud

Cloud computing, as a cutting-edge computing paradigm, offers substantial data processing and storage capabilities. In a heterogeneous cloud environment, the diversity among cloud platforms results in varying task execution times, posing challenges in minimizing workflow makespan under budget constraints. On this basis, a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, named snake optimizer (SO), is proposed for workflow scheduling in the cloud. Then, a negative offset mechanism is designed to dynamically guide the offset of individual positions during population update to prevent falling into local optimums, thereby optimizing the search for feasible solutions and improving the success rate. Finally, using the negative offset mechanism, a snake optimization budget-aware scheduling algorithm (NO-SO) is developed to schedule budget-constrained workflows in heterogeneous cloud computing environments and minimize the makespan. A series of comparative experiments conducted on real-world scientific workflows demonstrates that the NO-SO algorithm enhances the success rate in finding a feasible solution by 38.89% and 34.45% compared with the advanced MG-PRO algorithm and the original SO algorithm, respectively. Moreover, it achieves an average reduction in makespan of 30.30% and 32.19%.