An enhanced multi-objective fireworks algorithm for task scheduling in fog computing environment

With the rapid advancements in processing and storage technology along with the popularity of the internet, computing capabilities have become more affordable, efficient, and widely accessible than ever before. This advancement has resulted in the emergence of a modern computing environment known as fog computing. Due to the latency-sensitiveness feature, computation of these services in fog computing is advantageous than cloud. Task scheduling is a significant issue in fog systems and substantially impacts resource utilization, task computation, and latency time. Many heuristic and meta-heuristic techniques have been applied to solve the scheduling issue. For the success of any meta-heuristic algorithm, an appropriate composition of exploration and exploitation of solution space is required to improve convergence and avoid local optima. To meet these requirements, a modified fireworks algorithm with the combination of opposition-based learning and differential evolution techniques is presented. Differential evolution operator has been utilized to avoid local optima and opposition-based learning technique has been applied for creating a diversified solution set of population. The proposed method works on the minimization of makespan and cost and improves resource utilization. The experiments have been carried out on a variety of workloads, and the findings have been compared with some recent popular metaheuristic techniques. The comparison has verified the importance of the proposed approach.