Near‐optimal dynamic priority scheduling strategy for instance‐intensive business workflows in cloud computing

Utilization of cloud computing resources has made a fast growth in e‐business. Business and government agencies often need to handle large volume of service requests, the so‐called instance‐intensive business processes in a constrained period. On‐time completion for instance‐intensive business processes within the constrained time is a very important issue. In the past few years, traditional optimal task scheduling has been well researched and proven to be a nondeterministic polynomial (NP) time–complete problem. So many heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms are put forward to solve the issue with near‐optimal solutions. However, most of them just treat a single workflow instance as a multistep task without considering that steps within a task can be different types of activities. To explain multistep features of business workflows, a typical motivating instance‐intensive business example of security exchange and a multistep scheduling model for business workflows are introduced in this paper. Then our near‐optimal dynamic priority scheduling (DPS) strategy is proposed on the basis of the idea of Min‐Min heuristic algorithm and greedy philosophy. Compared to the first come first served and constrained Min‐Min by makespan and standard deviation, DPS can make a more optimized choice in each round of scheduling towards overall outcome. To show the effectiveness of DPS, theoretical minimum execution time (MET_theory) is used as a benchmark for evaluation based on simulation. The results show that the ratios between MET_theory and DPS are more than 98.5% by scheduling different orders of magnitude tasks from 1000 to 1 000 000. In particular, the ratio between MET_theory and DPS is nearly 99.9% with 1 000 000 tasks, which means that our DPS can get the near‐optimal result when scheduling large number of tasks.