Online scheduling of dependent tasks of cloud’s workflows to enhance resource utilization and reduce the makespan using multiple reinforcement learning-based agents

Due to different heterogeneous cloud resources and diverse and complex applications of the users, an optimal task scheduling, which can satisfy users and cloud service providers with energy-saving and cost-effective use of resources, is a major issue in cloud computing. On the one hand, network users are demanding the quality assurance of their requested services, minimizing their costs, and their own data security, and on the other hand, the service providers consider less power consumption, more efficient use of resources, and optimal utilization. In dependent tasks dealing with massive data, resource scheduling is considered as an important challenge. Due to the time limitation of online scheduling process of dependent tasks, many existing methods of the literature are not able to guarantee the best resource utilization. In this paper, a reinforcement learning approach is exploited in a multi-agent system for task scheduling and resource provisioning, in order to reduce the makespan, minimize the required power, optimize the cost of using the resources, and maximize the utilization of the resources (considering their expiration time), simultaneously. The proposed algorithm has two phases. In the first phase, the tasks are scheduled using reinforcement learning techniques, and in the second one, considering the information obtained from the scheduling phase, resources are allocated in a multi-agent environment. The results of experiments show that this method improves the efficiency of the use of resources and reduces their costs. Moreover, the expiration time of the tasks is observed and the total execution time and energy consumption will be significantly reduced.