A Multi-objective Optimization Approach to Workflow Scheduling in Clouds Considering Fault Recovery

Workflow scheduling is one of the challenging problems in cloud computing, especially when service reliability is considered. To improve cloud service reliability, fault tolerance techniques such as fault recovery can be employed. Practically, fault recovery has impact on the performance of workflow scheduling. Such impact deserves detailed research. Only few research works on workflow scheduling consider fault recovery and its impact. In this paper, we investigate the problem of workflow scheduling in clouds, considering the probability that cloud resources may fail during execution. We formulate this problem as a multi-objective optimization model. The first optimization objective is to minimize the overall completion time and the second one is to minimize the overall execution cost. Based on the proposed optimization model, we develop a heuristic-based algorithm called Min-min based time and cost tradeoff (MTCT). We perform extensive simulations with four different real world scientific workflows to verify the validity of the proposed model and evaluate the performance of our algorithm. The results show that, as expected, fault recovery has significant impact on the two performance criteria, and the proposed MTCT algorithm is useful for real life workflow scheduling when both of the two optimization objectives are considered.