Data-intensive workflow scheduling strategy based on deep reinforcement learning in multi-clouds

With the increase development of Internet of Things devices, the data-intensive workflow has emerged as a new kinds of representation for IoT applications. Because most IoT systems are structured in multi-clouds environment and the data-intensive workflow has the characteristics of scattered data sources and distributed execution requirements at the cloud center and edge clouds, it brings many challenges to the scheduling of such workflow, such as data flow control management, data transmission scheduling, etc. Aiming at the execution constraints of business and technology and data transmission optimization of data-intensive workflow, a data-intensive workflow scheduling method based on deep reinforcement learning in multi-clouds is proposed. First, the execution constraints, edge node load and data transmission volume of IoT data workflow are modeled; then the data-intensive workflow is segmented with the consideration of business constraints and the first optimization goal of data transmission; besides, taking the workflow execution time and average load balancing as the secondary optimization goal, the improved DQN algorithm is used to schedule the workflow. Based on the DQN algorithm, the model reward function and action selection are redesigned and improved. The simulation results based on WorkflowSim show that, compared with MOPSO, NSGA-II, GTBGA and DQN, the algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the execution time of IoT data workflow under the condition of ensuring the execution constraints and load balancing of multi-clouds.