A Cost-Driven Fuzzy Scheduling Strategy for Intelligent Workflow Decision Making Systems in Uncertain Edge-Cloud Environments

Workflow decision making is critical to performing many practical workflow applications. Scheduling in edge-cloud environments can address the high complexity problem of workflow applications, while decreasing the data transmission delay between the cloud and end devices. However, because of the heterogeneous resources in edge-cloud environments and the complicated data dependencies among the tasks in a workflow, significant challenges for workflow scheduling remain, including the selection of an optimal tasks-servers solution from the possible numerous combinations. The existing studies have been mainly done subject to rigorous conditions without fluctuations, ignoring the fact that workflow scheduling is typically present in uncertain environments. In this study, we focus on reducing the execution cost of workflow applications mainly caused by task computation and data transmission, while satisfying the workflow deadline in uncertain edge-cloud environments. The Triangular Fuzzy Numbers (TFNs) are adopted to represent the task processing time and data transferring time. A cost-driven fuzzy scheduling strategy based on an Adaptive Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (ADPSO) algorithm is proposed, which employs the operators of Genetic Algorithm (GA). This strategy introduces the randomly two-point crossover operator, neighborhood mutation operator, and adaptive multipoint mutation operator of GA to effectively avoid converging on local optima. The experimental results show that our strategy can effectively reduce the workflow execution cost in uncertain edge-cloud environments, compared with other benchmark solutions.