Research on the collaboration of service selection and resource scheduling for IoT simulation workflows

Cloud resources provide a promising way to efficiently perform the needed simulation tasks for a complex manufacturing process. Most of the existing work focuses only on how to effectively schedule computing resources to execute computing requirements of simulation workflows in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Research on the scheduling of simulation workflows in consideration of task ordering, service selection, and resource allocation altogether has not been lacking. To fill in this void, this paper proposes a cloud-based 3-stage workflow scheduling model. Before scheduling computing resources to complete task requirements, the order of the tasks is determined and the services that can meet the task requirements are selected. In this model, the workload to satisfy task requirements is not fixed and takes on a different value depending upon the service selected with its unique complexity and accuracy. An optimization function that transforms and integrates makespan, cost, and accuracy in a unique way is proposed. For its solution, the relatively new symbiotic organisms search (SOS) algorithm is modified and two SOS-based optimization strategies are developed, i.e., joint optimization-based SOS (JOSOS) and split optimization-based SOS (SOSOS). The simulation results reveal that SOS-based algorithms, especially the SOSOS method, outperform all compared algorithms. Based on the proposed method, simulation services and computing resources can be rationally selected and scheduled to ensure the requirements of IoT applications.