An improved Monte Carlo Tree Search approach to workflow scheduling

Workflow computing has become an essential part of many scientific and engineering fields, while workflow scheduling has long been a well-known NP-complete research problem. Major previous works can be classified into two categories: heuristic-based and guided random-search-based workflow scheduling...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hok-Leung Kung, Shu-Jun Yang, Kuo-Chan Huang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2022-12-01
Series:Connection Science
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540091.2022.2052265
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Workflow computing has become an essential part of many scientific and engineering fields, while workflow scheduling has long been a well-known NP-complete research problem. Major previous works can be classified into two categories: heuristic-based and guided random-search-based workflow scheduling methods. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a recently proposed search methodology with great success in AI research on game playing, such as Computer Go. However, researchers found that MCTS also has potential application in many other domains, including combinatorial optimization, task scheduling, planning, and so on. In this paper, we present a new workflow scheduling approach based on MCTS, which is still a rarely explored direction. Several new mechanisms are developed for the major steps in MCTS to improve workflow execution schedules further. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms previous methods significantly in terms of execution makespan.
ISSN:0954-0091
1360-0494