ABSTRACT

The aim of workflow scheduling system is to schedule the workflows within the user given deadline to achieve a good success rate. Workflow is a set of tasks processed in a predefined order based on its data and control dependency. Scheduling these workflows in a computing environment, like cloud environment, is an NP-Complete problem and it becomes more challenging when failures of tasks are considered. To overcome these failures, the workflow scheduling system should be fault tolerant. In this paper, the proposed Fault Tolerant Workflow Scheduling algorithm (FTWS) provides fault tolerance by using replication and resubmission of tasks based on priority of the tasks. The replication of tasks depends on a heuristic metric which is calculated by finding the tradeoff between the replication factor and resubmission factor. The heuristic metric is considered because replication alone may lead to resource wastage and resubmission alone may increase makespan. Tasks are prioritized based on the criticality of the task which is calculated by using parameters like out degree, earliest deadline and high resubmission impact. Priority helps in meeting the deadline of a task and thereby reducing wastage of resources. FTWS schedules workflows within a deadline even in the presence of failures without using any history of information. The experiments were conducted in a simulated cloud environment by scheduling workflows in the presence of failures which are generated randomly. The experimental results of the proposed work demonstrate the effective success rate in-spite of various failures.