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Distributed computing, e.g., cluster and cloud computing, has been applied in almost all areas for data processing, while high resource efficiency and user satisfaction are still the ambition of distributed computing. Task scheduling is indispensable for achieving the goal. As the task scheduling problem is NP-hard, heuristics and meta-heuristics are frequently applied. Every method has its own advantages and limitations. Thus, in this paper, we designed a hybrid heuristic task scheduling problem by exploiting the high global search ability of the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the fast convergence of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Different from existing hybrid heuristic approaches that simply sequentially perform two or more algorithms, the PGA applies the evolutionary method of a GA and integrates self- and social cognitions into the evolution. We conduct extensive simulated environments for the performance evaluation, where simulation parameters are set referring to some recent related works. Experimental results show that the PGA has 27.9–65.4% and 33.8–69.6% better performance than several recent works, on average, in user satisfaction and resource efficiency, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile robots are relevant dynamic systems in recent applications. Path planning is an essential task for these robots since it allows them to move from one location to another safely and at an affordable cost. Path planning has been studied extensively for static scenarios. However, when the scenarios are dynamic, research is limited due to the complexity and high cost of continuously re-planning the robot's movements to ensure its safety. This paper proposes a new, simple, reliable, and affordable method to plan safe and optimized paths for differential mobile robots in dynamic scenarios. The method is based on the online re-optimization of the static parameters in the state-of-the-art deterministic path planner Bug0. Due to the complexity of the dynamic path planning problem, a metaheuristic optimization approach is adopted. This approach utilizes metaheuristics from evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence to find the Bug0 parameters when the mobile robot is approaching an obstacle. The proposal is tested in simulation, and well-known metaheuristic methods are compared, including Differential Evolution (DE), the Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The dynamic planner based on PSO generates paths with the best performances. In addition, the results of the PSO-based planner are compared with different Bug0 configurations, and the former is shown to be significantly better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]