In the era of the Internet of Things, the significant increase in data volume, time, and space complexity presents great challenges to workflow scheduling in resource-constrained clouds. This study proposes an efficient hybrid algorithm, denoted white shark optimization (WSO) algorithm with budget constraints (BC-WSO), designed to adhere to budget constraints. The primary objective of BC-WSO is to optimize the scheduling length and cost. This objective is achieved by employing a heuristic algorithm that utilizes the predicted makespan matrix (PMMS) alongside the WSO algorithm as its foundation. The PMMS can minimize the scheduling length of a workflow application and satisfy the task prioritization dependencies. BC-WSO incorporates PMMS into the population initialization phase to improve the accuracy of WSO and accelerate the convergence process. Extensive experiments in two real-world scientific workflow applications show that BC-WSO outperforms current state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms in simultaneously optimizing scheduling length and cost.

Cloud computing, as a cutting-edge computing paradigm, offers substantial data processing and storage capabilities. In a heterogeneous cloud environment, the diversity among cloud platforms results in varying task execution times, posing challenges in minimizing workflow makespan under budget constraints. On this basis, a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, named snake optimizer (SO), is proposed for workflow scheduling in the cloud. Then, a negative offset mechanism is designed to dynamically guide the offset of individual positions during population update to prevent falling into local optimums, thereby optimizing the search for feasible solutions and improving the success rate. Finally, using the negative offset mechanism, a snake optimization budget-aware scheduling algorithm (NO-SO) is developed to schedule budget-constrained workflows in heterogeneous cloud computing environments and minimize the makespan. A series of comparative experiments conducted on real-world scientific workflows demonstrates that the NO-SO algorithm enhances the success rate in finding a feasible solution by 38.89% and 34.45% compared with the advanced MG-PRO algorithm and the original SO algorithm, respectively. Moreover, it achieves an average reduction in makespan of 30.30% and 32.19%.

With the rapid development of economic globalization and informationization, the Chinese e-government is still in its adolescence with a long way ahead. Based on some recent research in Guangdong province, we find that e-government affair systems play important roles therein and represent a certain kind of application called Form-centered Application Systems (FAS). After much investigation and analysis on e-government's background, daily routine and regulations, we summarize some rules and disciplines of its business process modeling, based on which we characterize requirements of FAS. Though currently many process modeling approaches or techniques have been proposed and widely used, they can not fully and easily meet the special needs. In this paper, we introduce a new business process model called Double-State Based Business Process Description Model (DSBPDM), which is composed of Business Process Model (BPM) and Dispatching Model (DM), where BPM enriches Finite State Machine (FSM) Model by three constraint checks, business logic and message passing, whereas DM delineates the dispatching and executing status of the business object in its lifetime. After presenting DSBPDM's formal definition, we discuss the essence of process forwarding by deducing its operational semantics formally. In this way, key issues such as explicit state and operation representation, rigorous constraint expression, complex authorization check, and full picture of the dispatching and executing of business objects are nicely tackled. Our practice shows that building FAS system with DSBPDM and its supporting platform fits the requirements well, provides an open and transparent view of business process, satisfies the needs of the public and officials, and helps to get a comprehensive insight into the meaning of business process forwarding.