An architecture for workflow scheduling under resource allocation constraints

Research on specification and scheduling of workflows has concentrated on temporal and causality constraints, which specify existence and order dependencies among tasks. However, another set of constraints that specify resource allocation is also equally important. The resources in a workflow environment are agents such as person, machine, software, etc. that execute the task. Execution of a task has a cost and this may vary depending on the resources allocated in order to execute that task. Resource allocation constraints define restrictions on how to allocate resources, and scheduling under resource allocation constraints provide proper resource allocation to tasks. In this work, we provide an architecture to specify and to schedule workflows under resource allocation constraints as well as under the temporal and causality constraints. A specification language with the ability to express resources and resource allocation constraints and a scheduler module that contains a constraint solver in order to find correct resource assignments are core and novel parts of this architecture. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Integer Linear Programming Solution for the Multiple Query Optimization Problem

Multiple Query Optimization (MQO) is a technique for processing a batch of queries in such a way that shared tasks in these queries are executed only once, resulting in significant savings in the total evaluation. The first phase of MQO requires producing alternative query execution plans so that the shared tasks between queries are identified and maximized. The second phase of MQO is an optimization problem where the goal is selecting exactly one of the alternative plans for each query to minimize the total execution cost of all queries. A-star, branch-and-bound, dynamic programming (DP), and genetic algorithm (GA) solutions for MQO have been given in the literature. However, the performance of optimal algorithms, A-star and DP, is not sufficient for solving large MQO problems involving large number of queries. In this study, we propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation to solve the MQO problem exactly for a large number of queries and evaluate its performance. Our results show that ILP outperforms the existing A-star algorithm