Electricity-cost-aware multi-workflow scheduling in heterogeneous cloud

Multi-workflows are commonly deployed on cloud platforms to achieve efficient computational power. Diverse task configuration requirements, the heterogeneous nature and dynamic electricity price of cloud servers impose significant challenges for economically scheduling multi-workflows. In this paper, we propose a Heuristic Electricity-cost-aware Multi-workflow Scheduling algorithm (HEMS) to search for an optimal scheduling plan which determines the optimal scheduling scheme for each task in each workflow, specifying the server to perform the task with determined resources in specific time. The objective is to minimize the total electricity cost of all servers while satisfying the deadline constraints of all workflows. The HEMS algorithm consists of five components: Workflow Scheduling Sequence Generation, Task Scheduling Sequence Initialization for each workflow, Optimal Scheduling Scheme Determination for each task, initial Task Scheduling Sequence Optimization, and Optimal Scheduling Plan Optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that HEMS consistently achieves the optimal scheduling plan with the lower total electricity cost (saving 54.5–69.1% on average) within slightly longer CPU time for various multi-workflows compared to existing three scheduling approaches.