Nature-inspired metaheuristic scheduling algorithms in cloud: a systematic review

Complex huge-scale scientific applications are simplified by workflow to execute in the cloud environment. The cloud is an emerging concept that effectively executes workflows, but it has a range of issues that must be addressed for it to progress. Workflow scheduling using a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm is a recent central theme in the cloud computing paradigm. It is an NP-complete problem that fascinates researchers to explore the optimum solution using swarm intelligence. This is a wide area where researchers work for a long time to find an optimum solution but due to the lack of actual research direction, their objectives become faint. Our systematic and extensive analysis of scheduling approaches involves recently high-cited metaheuristic algorithms like Genetic Algorithms (GA), Whale Search Algorithm (WSA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Bat Algorithm, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Cuckoo Algorithm, Firefly Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Based on various parameters, we do not only classify them but also furnish a comprehensive striking comparison among them with the hope that our efforts will assist recent researchers to select an appropriate technique for further undiscovered issues. We also draw the attention of present researchers towards some open issues to dig out unexplored areas like energy consumption, reliability and security for considering them as future research work.