Dynamic scheduling for real‐time distributed systems using ant colony optimization

Abstract

Purpose

In client/server distributed systems, the server is often the bottleneck. Improving the server performance is thus crucial for improving the overall performance of distributed information systems. Real‐time system is required to complete its work and deliver its services on a timely basis. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new scheduling algorithm for real‐time distributed system (client/server model) to achieve the above‐mentioned goal.

Design/methodology/approach

The ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms are computational models inspired by the collective foraging behavior of ants. They provide inherent parallelism and robustness. Therefore, they are appropriate for scheduling of tasks in soft real‐time systems. During simulation, results are obtained with periodic tasks, measured in terms of success ratio and effective CPU utilization; and compared with results of earliest deadline first (EDF) algorithm in the same environment.

Findings

Analysis and experiments show that the proposed algorithm is equally efficient during underloaded conditions. The performance of EDF decreases as the load increases, but the proposed algorithm works well in overloaded conditions also. Because of this type of property, the proposed algorithm is more suitable for the situation when future workload of the system is unpredictable.

Originality/value

The application of ACO algorithms for scheduling of client/server real‐time distributed system, never found before in the literature. The new concept proposed in this paper will be of great significance to both theoretical and practical research in scheduling of distributed systems in the years to come.

Citation

Shah, A., Kotecha, K. and Shah, D. (2010), "Dynamic scheduling for real‐time distributed systems using ant colony optimization", International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 279-292. https://doi.org/10.1108/17563781011049205