[alife] Call for Book Chapters - Meta-heuristics for Scheduling

[Ajith Abraham]

Call for Book Chapters

http://www.softcomputing.net/mhs.html

Series in Studies in Computational Intelligence

Meta-heuristics for Scheduling : In Emergent Computational Systems


Introduction

With the rapid development of Internet and other new technologies,
different kinds of network, distributed computing paradigms and
platforms are emerging as the new wave in computing of the new
millennium. Examples of such emergent computational systems are Grid
and P2P systems, which are currently being used for solving many
complex problems from science and engineering.  A broad range of issues
are being addressed nowadays, from theory to practical development  and
fast advances are made and reported by researcher from both academia
and industry for a wide range of problems in this context. One such
important issue is the scheduling problem, that is, the efficient
allocations of jobs to geographically distributed resources, which is
indispensable for the development of High Performance Distributed
Applications.
Despite of the family of scheduling problems being one of the must
studied  by the optimization research community, the available
approaches do not apply in a straightforward way to the Job Scheduling
in Computational Grids and P2P systems as it significantly differs from
conventional scheduling on LANs or parallel computer systems. This can
be explained by the fact that scheduling in grid systems adds new
features not present in conventional scheduling due to proper
scheduling characteristics of the large-scale distributed environments.
Indeed, jobs have their own characteristics, for instance, due to the
heterogeneity of resources, jobs and resources could be incompatible.
Moreover, given the dynamics of such systems, schedulers should be very
fast in order to adapt to the changes of the system. Regarding the
optimization criteria, besides typical optimization criteria such as
minimization of makespan and flowtime, other important criteria are to
be considered such as maximizing resource utilization, resource owner's
benefits, etc. Thus, the problem is multi-objective in its general
formulation. On the other hand, scheduling must take into account
possible local policies on resources (e.g. access and cost), the
existence of local schedulers, etc. Therefore, current research efforts
are addressing new techniques for dealing in practice with the
complexity of the problem, among them, we distinguish the
meta-heuristic techniques--the de facto approach for hard combinatorial
optimization problems.

The Overall Objective of the Book

There exists a need for an edited collection of articles in this
disciplinary area that will give a comprehensive view of most recent
advances from theory and practice of the job scheduling problem in
large-scale distributed systems. The book aims to provide relevant
theoretical frameworks and latest empirical research findings in this
regard. Readers can benefit from this book in understanding the basics
and current techniques applied for solving the scheduling problem in
emergent computational systems, as well as its use in developing
large-scale distributed applications.

The Target Audience

The audiences of this book are senior or graduate students major in
computer science, computer engineering, applied informatics, or
management information system as well as professional instructors and
researchers. The book is also written for professionals in distributed
computing paradigms who want to understand the essentials of using
meta-heuristics for tackling the scheduling and resource allocation
problems in Grid, P2P and other computational emergent systems.

Recommended topics include but are not limited to the following:

   * Single heuristic approaches (Local-search based techniques,
population-based techniques, swarm optimization techniques)
   * Hybrid heuristic approaches (Hybridization of different
heuristics)
   * Parallel implementations of single/hybrid heuristic approaches
   * Ad hoc approaches used in combination with heuristic approaches
   * Economic based approaches used in combination with heuristic
approaches
   * Summary of Current Research Activities and Future Directions

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE & SCHEDULE

The book is intended to be published in the Springer Verlag, Series -
'Studies in Computational Intelligence'. Please prepare the manuscript
using the author guidelines and format given in the following link:
Author Guidelines

   *

     PROPOSAL: Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on
or before January 15, 2007  a 2-5 page manuscript proposal clearly
explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter. Authors
will be notified about the suitability of the chapters within 2 weeks
of the submission date.
   *

     Full CHAPTER SUBMISSION: March 30, 2007. Chapters have to be no
more than 40 pages length and will be peer-reviewed by at least three
referees.

   *

     NOTIFICATION: Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by
May 30, 2007, about the status of their proposals and sent chapter
organizational guidelines. Full accepted chapters are expected to be
submitted by 31 July, 2007.


The book is scheduled to be published by Springer-Verlag by end of
2007.  Inquiries and Submissions can be forwarded electronically (as a
PDF file) to one of the Volume editors:

Volume Editors:

Fatos Xhafa, Ph.D.
Email: fatos at lsi.upc.edu


Ajith Abraham, Ph.D.
Email: ajith.abraham at ieee.org
http://www.softcomputing.net