An improved ant algorithm for grid scheduling problem

Grid computing is a promising technology for future computing platforms and is expected to provide easier access to remote computational resources that are usually locally limited. Scheduling is one of the active research topics in grid environments. The goal of grid task scheduling is to achieve high system throughput and to allocate various computing resources to applications. The complexity of scheduling problem increases with the size of the grid and becomes highly difficult to solve effectively. Many different methods have been proposed to solve this problem. Some of these methods are based on heuristic techniques that provide an optimal or near optimal solution for large grids. In this paper we introduce a new task scheduling algorithm based on ant colony optimization (ACO). According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm confidently demonstrates its competitiveness with previously proposed algorithms.