Parallel Job Scheduling Using Bacterial Foraging Optimization for Heterogeneous Multi-cluster Environment

Efficient multiprocessor scheduling is essentially the problem of allocating a set of computational jobs to a set of processors to minimize the overall execution time. The main issue is how jobs are partitioned in which total finishing time and waiting time is minimized. Minimization of these two criteria simultaneously, is a multi objective optimization problem. There are many variations of this problem, most of which are NP-hard problem, so we must rely on heuristics to solve the problem instances. Many heuristic-based approaches have been applied to finding schedules that minimize the execution time of computing tasks on parallel processors. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is currently employed in several optimization and search problems due to its ease and ability to find solutions successfully. A variant of PSO, called as improved particle swarm optimization (ImPSO) has been developed in this paper and is hybridized with the ant colony optimization (ACO) to achieve better solutions. The proposed hybrid algorithm effectively exploits the capabilities of distributed and parallel computing of swarm intelligence approaches. In addition hybrid algorithm using improved particle swarm optimization (ImPSO) with artificial immune system (AIS) is also implemented for the same set of problems to compare with the proposed hybrid algorithm (ImPSO with ACO). It was observed that the proposed hybrid approach (Improved PSO with ACO) gives better results in experiments and reduces finishing and waiting time simultaneously. Key words: Particle swarm optimization (PSO), improved particle swarm optimization (ImPSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), job scheduling, finishing time, waiting time.

Complex huge-scale scientific applications are simplified by workflow to execute in the cloud environment. The cloud is an emerging concept that effectively executes workflows, but it has a range of issues that must be addressed for it to progress. Workflow scheduling using a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm is a recent central theme in the cloud computing paradigm. It is an NP-complete problem that fascinates researchers to explore the optimum solution using swarm intelligence. This is a wide area where researchers work for a long time to find an optimum solution but due to the lack of actual research direction, their objectives become faint. Our systematic and extensive analysis of scheduling approaches involves recently high-cited metaheuristic algorithms like Genetic Algorithms (GA), Whale Search Algorithm (WSA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Bat Algorithm, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Cuckoo Algorithm, Firefly Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Based on various parameters, we do not only classify them but also furnish a comprehensive striking comparison among them with the hope that our efforts will assist recent researchers to select an appropriate technique for further undiscovered issues. We also draw the attention of present researchers towards some open issues to dig out unexplored areas like energy consumption, reliability and security for considering them as future research work.

A review: On path planning strategies for navigation of mobile robot

Assisting elderly individuals in indoor environments is crucial, as they often encounter mobility and safety challenges. Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) navigation offers a transformative solution, significantly enhancing safety, efficiency, and quality of life. These UAVs can perform tasks such as monitoring, delivering essential items, and responding to emergencies, providing invaluable support and promoting greater independence for elderly individuals. To achieve effective assistance, autonomous UAV navigation relies on robust path planning with obstacle avoidance to ensure optimal performance. A newly developed path planning, based on a new hybrid Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA), stands out by addressing the challenge of avoiding obstacles while adhering to non-holonomic constraints and conserving energy in complex, cluttered indoor environments. In Population-Based Algorithms (PBAs), the initial population plays a crucial role, as it greatly impacts the algorithm’s efficiency in exploring the search space and its rate of convergence. The new developed hybrid algorithm, called WCA-HS, is based on using the Harmony Search (HS) algorithm to identify the optimal initial population for the WCA. The results indicate that the hybrid WCA-HS outperforms classical WCA and other metaheuristic algorithms, such as HS, Firefly Algorithm (FA), Cuckoo Search (CS), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Differential Evolution (DE), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), over 20 independent runs, highlighting the effectiveness of the population initialization technique. Additionally, the developed indoor path planning system was evaluated in highly cluttered and low-light environments, showcasing its robustness and real-world applicability, making it highly effective for assisting elderly individuals in complex indoor environments.

Adapted techniques of explainable artificial intelligence for explaining genetic algorithms on the example of job scheduling

Multiprocessor scheduling in a shared multiprogramming environment can be structured as two-level scheduling, where a kernel-level job scheduler allots processors to jobs and a user-level thread scheduler schedules the work of a job on its allotted processors. We present a randomized work-stealing thread scheduler for fork-join multithreaded jobs that provides continual parallelism feedback to the job scheduler in the form of requests for processors. Our A-STEAL algorithm is appropriate for large parallel servers where many jobs share a common multiprocessor resource and in which the number of processors available to a particular job may vary during the job's execution. Assuming that the job scheduler never allots a job more processors than requested by the job's thread scheduler, A-STEAL guarantees that the job completes in near-optimal time while utilizing at least a constant fraction of the allotted processors. We model the job scheduler as the thread scheduler's adversary, challenging the thread scheduler to be robust to the operating environment as well as to the job scheduler's administrative policies. For example, the job scheduler might make a large number of processors available exactly when the job has little use for them. To analyze the performance of our adaptive thread scheduler under this stringent adversarial assumption, we introduce a new technique called trim analysis, which allows us to prove that our thread scheduler performs poorly on no more than a small number of time steps, exhibiting near-optimal behavior on the vast majority. More precisely, suppose that a job has work T 1 and span T ∞ . On a machine with P processors, A-STEAL completes the job in an expected duration of O ( T 1 / P˜ + T ∞ + L lg P ) time steps, where L is the length of a scheduling quantum, and P˜ denotes the O ( T ∞ + L lg P )-trimmed availability. This quantity is the average of the processor availability over all time steps except the O ( T ∞ + L lg P ) time steps that have the highest processor availability. When the job's parallelism dominates the trimmed availability, that is, P˜ < T 1 / T ∞ , the job achieves nearly perfect linear speedup. Conversely, when the trimmed mean dominates the parallelism, the asymptotic running time of the job is nearly the length of its span, which is optimal. We measured the performance of A-STEAL on a simulated multiprocessor system using synthetic workloads. For jobs with sufficient parallelism, our experiments confirm that A-STEAL provides almost perfect linear speedup across a variety of processor availability profiles. We compared A-STEAL with the ABP algorithm, an adaptive work-stealing thread scheduler developed by Arora et al. [1998] which does not employ parallelism feedback. On moderately to heavily loaded machines with large numbers of processors, A-STEAL typically completed jobs more than twice as quickly as ABP, despite being allotted the same number or fewer processors on every step, while wasting only 10% of the processor cycles wasted by ABP.

Metaheuristic-based energy management strategies for fuel cell emergency power unit in electrical aircraft

Job scheduling in grid computing is a very important problem. To utilize grids efficiently, we need a good job scheduling algorithm to assign jobs to resources in grids. The main scope of this article is to propose a new Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm for balanced job scheduling in the Grid environment. To achieve the above goal, we will indicate a way to balance the entire system load while minimizing the makespan of a given set of jobs. Based on the experimental results, the proposed algorithm confidently demonstrates its practicability and competitiveness compared with other job scheduling algorithms.

Hippopotamus algorithm for optimal sizing of hybrid renewable energy system

IoT cloud computing provides all functions of traditional computing as services through the Internet for the users. Big data processing is one of the most crucial advantages of IoT cloud computing. However, IoT cloud job scheduling is considered an NP-hard problem due to the hardness of allocating the clients’ jobs to suitable IoT cloud provider resources. Previous work on job scheduling tried to minimize the execution time of the job scheduling in the IoT cloud, but it still needs improvement. This paper proposes an enhanced job scheduling mechanism using cat swarm optimization (CSO) with modified distance to minimize the execution time. The proposed job scheduling mechanism first creates a set of jobs and resources to generate the population by randomly assigning the jobs to resources. Then, it evaluates the population using the fitness value, which represents the execution time of the jobs. In addition, we use iterations to regenerate populations based on the cat’s behaviour to produce the best job schedule that gives the minimum execution time for the jobs. We evaluated the proposed mechanism by implementing an initial simulation using Java Language and then conducted a complete simulation using the CloudSim simulator. We ran several experimentation scenarios using different numbers of jobs and resources to evaluate the proposed mechanism regarding the execution time. The proposed mechanism significantly reduces the execution time when we compare the proposed mechanism against the firefly algorithm and glowworm swarm optimization. The average execution time of the proposed cat swarm optimization was 131, while the average execution times for the firefly algorithm and glowworm optimization were 237 and 220, respectively. Hence, the experimental findings demonstrated that the proposed mechanism performs better than the firefly algorithm and glowworm swarm optimization in reducing the execution time of the jobs.

Connected vehicles are revolutionizing the way in which transport and mobility are conceived. The main technology behind is the so-called Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), which are communication networks that connect vehicles and facilitate various services. Usually these services require a centralized architecture where the main server collects and disseminates information from/to vehicles. In this paper, we focus on improving the downlink information dissemination in VANETs with this centralized architecture. With this aim, we model the problem as a Vertex Covering optimization problem and we propose four new nature-inspired methods to solve it: Bat Algorithm (BA), Firefly Algorithm (FA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Cuckoo Search (CS). The new methods are tested over data from a real scenario. Results show that these metaheuristics, especially BA, FA and PSO, can be considered as powerful solvers for this optimization problem.

The research and development of metaheuristic methods are critical issues in computer science. In the past decade, metaheuristic algorithms have been used in many engineering applications such as optimization of engineering problems, telecommunications, information security, and image processing. Many metaheuristic algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), and genetic algorithm (GA) are recently becoming very popular.There are many studies conducted in the literature on the comparison of PSO with other metaheuristic algorithms. In this chapter, various studies carried out between the years of 2010 and 2020 about the comparison of PSO with the other metaheuristic algorithms will be examined. The metaheuristic algorithms to be considered are simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithm (GA), differential evolution (DE), ant colony optimization (ACO), artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO), tabu search (TS), harmony search (HS), firefly algorithm (FF), cuckoo search (CS), bat-inspired algorithm (BA), water wave optimization (WWO), clonal selection algorithm (CLONALG), chemical reaction optimization (CRO), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), glowworm swarm optimization (GSO), and grey wolf optimizer (GWO). This study aims to evaluate and analyze the covered papers according to several criteria such as (a) rates of studies according to publishing years, (b) the metaheuristic algorithms that are compared to PSO, (c) performance evaluation of compared algorithms, (d) the metaheuristic algorithms with their inspirational approaches and their initial proposed studies and years, (e) the field of subjects where the algorithms are applied in the reviewed studies, and (f) used databases in the examined studies.This study is a comprehensive literature review of the comparison of PSO with the most popular metaheuristic algorithms. The intention of this review is to be useful for researchers who want to conduct a survey on this area of the subject as this chapter will cover the essential and helpful analysis of the related research.

One of the most used artificial intelligence techniques for maximum power point tracking is artificial neural networks. In order to achieve successful results in maximum power point tracking, the training process of artificial neural networks is important. Metaheuristic algorithms are used extensively in the literature for neural network training. An important group of metaheuristic algorithms is swarm-intelligent-based optimization algorithms. In this study, feed-forward neural network training is carried out for maximum power point tracking by using 13 swarm-intelligent-based optimization algorithms. These algorithms are artificial bee colony, butterfly optimization, cuckoo search, chicken swarm optimization, dragonfly algorithm, firefly algorithm, grasshopper optimization algorithm, krill herd algorithm, particle swarm optimization, salp swarm algorithm, selfish herd optimizer, tunicate swarm algorithm, and tuna swarm optimization. Mean squared error is used as the error metric, and the performances of the algorithms in different network structures are evaluated. Considering the results, a success ranking score is obtained for each algorithm. The three most successful algorithms in both training and testing processes are the firefly algorithm, selfish herd optimizer, and grasshopper optimization algorithm, respectively. The training error values obtained with these algorithms are 4.5 × 10−4, 1.6 × 10−3, and 2.3 × 10−3, respectively. The test error values are 4.6 × 10−4, 1.6 × 10−3, and 2.4 × 10−3, respectively. With these algorithms, effective results have been achieved in a low number of evaluations. In addition to these three algorithms, other algorithms have also achieved mostly acceptable results. This shows that the related algorithms are generally successful ANFIS training algorithms for maximum power point tracking.

Detecting high-order single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) interactions is of great importance for the discovery of pathogenic causes of human complex diseases. However, a considerable computing challenge exists in analyzing each SNP combination at a genome-wide scale. Swarm intelligence search (SIS) is an effective and efficient method for solving NP-hard problems and has been extensively researched for detecting high-order SNP interactions. In this review, we first analyze the strengths and limitations of existing methods such as exhaustive search using cluster computing and parallel computing, stochastic search and high-performance computing. Then, SIS algorithms for the detection of high-order SNP interactions are introduced in detail. The algorithms discussed are the genetic algorithm (GA), ant colony optimization (ACO), harmony search (HS), particle swarm optimization (PSO), differential evolution (DE), cuckoo search (CS), fish swarm (FS) and artificial bee colony (ABC). Finally, we discuss the characteristics and limitations of the involved methods and provide several suggestions for improving SIS algorithms to detect high-order SNP interactions.

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is an NP-hard problem. Thus far, a large number of researchers have proposed different ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms to solve the TSP. These algorithms inevitably encounter problems such as long convergence time and the tendency to easily fall into local optima. On the basis of the ACO algorithm, this study proposes a dynamic adaptive ACO algorithm (DAACO). DAACO realizes the diversity of initialization of the ACO algorithm by dynamically determining the number of ants to be prevented from falling into local optimization. DAACO also adopts a hybrid local selection strategy to increase the quality of ant optimization and reduce the optimization time. Among the 20 instances of the TSPLIB dataset, the DAACO algorithm obtains 19 optimal values, and the solutions of 10 instances are better than those of other algorithms. The experimental results on the TSPLIB dataset show that the DAACO algorithm has obvious advantages in terms of convergence time, solution quality, and average value relative to existing state-of-the-art ACO algorithms.