Parallel Scheduling of Large-Scale Tasks for Industrial Cloud-Edge Collaboration

Industrial Internet of Things is moving toward an intelligent level with large-scale collaborative cloud and edge resources, making it possible for online supervision, fast analysis, and precise control for many manufacturing job shops. However, online processing of large-scale industrial computation brings huge communication overhead and energy consumption among cloud, edge, and end devices. To improve the performance of the cloud-edge collaboration, this article establishes a practical model of task scheduling considering two kinds of cloud-edge collaborative modes. We propose a parallel group-merge evolutionary algorithm to assign thousands of tasks in seconds. The algorithm separates tasks into weakly correlated groups and applies modified evolutionary operators to find a subsolution for each group. Then, the subsolutions are merged to form a complete solution for fine-tuning based on the cross-use of heuristics. Experimental results show that the proposed method could assign thousands of tasks to cloud servers and edge servers in seconds, reduce the overall task computing time by 36.97%, and save the overall energy by 23.71% at most.