Strategic Oscillation for Exploitation and Exploration of ACS Algorithm for Job Scheduling in Static Grid Computing

Exploitation and exploration mechanisms are the main components in metaheuristics algorithms. These mechanisms are implemented explicitly in ant colony system algorithm. The rate between the exploitation and exploration mechanisms is controlled using a parameter set by the users of the algorithm. However, the rate remains unchanged during the algorithm iterations, which makes the algorithm either bias toward exploitation or exploration. Hence, this study proposes a strategic oscillation rate to control the exploitation and exploration in ant colony system. The proposed algorithm was evaluated with job scheduling problem benchmarks on grid computing. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other metaheuristics algorithms in terms of makespan and flowtime. The strategic oscillation has improved the exploration and exploitation in ant colony system.