A novel seq2seq-based prediction approach for workflow scheduling

Workflow scheduling problems have been widely studied in cloud computing and edge computing, which aim to exploit cloud-edge resources to execute workflow tasks considering several constraints and optimization goals. However, in the era of Internet of things, the load of each computing task and the amount of data transferred between computing tasks will fluctuate, which changes the original workflow and needs for a new scheduling plan correspondingly. Existing methods are difficult to quickly cope with these dynamic changes and there are few studies applying neural networks to solve problems in workflow scheduling. To bridge the gap, we propose an innovative supervised learning method which leverages function-fitting strategy of neural networks to link the workflow environment and its optimal scheduling plan. Specifically, our approach can be divided into two steps, the first one is to generate dataset and train a seq2seq-based prediction models. In this step, we develop an algorithm for generating a significant amount of workflow instances while ensuring dataset diversity based on complexity estimation. Then we apply GA, NSGA, NSGA-NN three different types GA-based optimization methods to search optimal solutions. Finally, we construct dataset which includes {workflow, environment configurations -> obtained optimal solution} and train a seq2seq-based model. The other part is real-time generation of scheduling plans based on trained seq2seq-based model. Simulation experiments have confirmed that our method is both effective and efficient, demonstrating its ability to adapt to changes in the execution environment, workflow task load, and task data transmission, and effectively schedule tasks in real-time. The simulation results show that the seq2seq-based prediction method can approach 90% of the optimal scheme.