Ant Colony Optimizations for Resource- and Timing-Constrained Operation Scheduling

Abstract

Abstract-Operation scheduling (OS) is a fundamental problem in mapping an application to a computational device. It takes a behavioral application specification and produces a schedule to minimize either the completion time or the computing resources required to meet a given deadline. The OS problem is N P-hard; thus, effective heuristic methods are necessary to provide qualitative solutions. We present novel OS algorithms using the ant colony optimization approach for both timing-constrained scheduling (TCS) and resource-constrained scheduling (RCS) problems. The algorithms use a unique hybrid approach by combining the MAX-MIN ant system metaheuristic with traditional scheduling heuristics. We compiled a comprehensive testing benchmark set from real-world applications in order to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms. For TCS, our algorithm achieves better results compared with force-directed scheduling on almost all the testing cases with a maximum 19.5% reduction of the number of resources. For RCS, our algorithm outperforms a number of different list-scheduling heuristics with better stability and generates better results with up to 14.7% improvement. Our algorithms outperform the simulated annealing method for both scheduling problems in terms of quality, computing time, and stability.Index Terms-Force-directed scheduling (FDS), list scheduling, operation scheduling (OS), MAX-MIN ant system (MMAS).

Design space exploration using time and resource duality with the ant colony optimization

“…Space does not permit us to elaborate the algorithms here. Interested readers are encouraged to refer to [14,13].…”

Design space exploration using time and resource duality with the ant colony optimization

“…The MMAS-based TCS and RCS algorithms as similar to those described in Section [14]. Since there is no widely distributed and recognized FDS implementation, we implemented our own.…”

Ant colony optimisation for scheduling of flexible job shop with multi-resources requirements

“…An ant colony optimization approach (ACO) is also widely used for the shop scheduling [19][20][21][22][23] resource-constrained scheduling (RCS) and resource-constrained project scheduling problems (RCPSP) [24]. Novel operation scheduling algorithms using the ant colony optimization approach for both timing-constrained scheduling (TCS) and RCS is proposed in [25]. The combinations of two pheromone evaluation methods are discussed in [26].…”