Cloud computing has emerged as the most favorable computing platform for researchers and industry. The load balanced task scheduling has emerged as an important and challenging research problem in the Cloud computing. Swarm intelligence-based meta-heuristic algorithms are considered more suitable for Cloud scheduling and load balancing. The optimization procedure of swarm intelligence-based meta-heuristics consists of two major components that are the local and global search. These algorithms find the best position through the local and global search. To achieve an optimized mapping strategy for tasks to the resources, a balance between local and global search plays an effective role. The inertia weight is an important control attribute to effectively adjust the local and global search process. There are many inertia weight strategies; however, the existing approaches still require fine-tuning to achieve optimum scheduling. The selection of a suitable inertia weight strategy is also an important factor. This paper contributed an adaptive Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) based task scheduling approach that reduces the task execution time, and increases throughput and Average Resource Utilization Ratio (ARUR). Moreover, an adaptive inertia weight strategy namely Linearly Descending and Adaptive Inertia Weight (LDAIW) is introduced. The proposed scheduling approach provides a better balance between local and global search leading to an optimized task scheduling. The performance of the proposed approach has been evaluated and compared against five renown PSO based inertia weight strategies concerning makespan and throughput. The experiments are then extended and compared the proposed approach against the other four renowned meta-heuristic scheduling approaches. Analysis of the simulated experimentation reveals that the proposed approach attained up to 10%, 12% and 60% improvement for makespan, throughput and ARUR respectively.

Cloud computing has been imperative for computing systems worldwide since its inception. The researchers strive to leverage the efficient utilization of cloud resources to execute workload quickly in addition to providing better quality of service. Among several challenges on the cloud, task scheduling is one of the fundamental NP-hard problems. Meta-heuristic algorithms are extensively employed to solve task scheduling as a discrete optimization problem and therefore several meta-heuristic algorithms have been developed. However, they have their own strengths and weaknesses. Local optima, poor convergence, high execution time, and scalability are the predominant issues among meta-heuristic algorithms. In this paper, a parallel enhanced whale optimization algorithm is proposed to schedule independent tasks in the cloud with heterogeneous resources. The proposed algorithm improves solution diversity and avoids local optima using a modified encircling maneuver and an adaptive bubble net attacking mechanism. The parallelization technique keeps the execution time low despite its internal complexity. The proposed algorithm minimizes the makespan while improving resource utilization and throughput. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed PEWOA against the best performing enhanced whale optimization algorithm (WOAmM) and Multi-core Random Matrix Particle Swarm Optimization (MRMPSO). The algorithm consistently produces better results with varying number of tasks on GoCJ dataset, indicating better scalability. The experiments are conducted in CloudSim utilizing a variety of GoCJ and HCSP instances. Various statistical tests are also conducted to evaluate the significance of the results.

The emergency of the pandemic and the absence of treatment have motivated researchers in all the fields to deal with the pandemic situation. In the field of computer science, major contributions include the development of methods for the diagnosis, detection, and prediction of COVID-19 cases. Since the emergence of information technology, data science and machine learning have become the most widely used techniques to detect, diagnose, and predict the positive cases of COVID-19. This paper presents the prediction of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and its mortality rate and then a COVID-19 warning system is proposed based on the machine learning time series model. We have used the date and country-wise confirmed, detected, recovered, and death cases features for training of the model based on the COVID-19 dataset. Finally, we compared the performance of time series models on the current study dataset, and we observed that PROPHET and Auto-Regressive (AR) models predicted the COVID-19 positive cases with a low error rate. Moreover, death cases are positively correlated with the confirmed detected cases, mainly based on different regions’ populations. The proposed forecasting system, driven by machine learning approaches, will help the health departments of underdeveloped countries to monitor the deaths and confirm detected cases of COVID-19. It will also help make futuristic decisions on testing and developing more health facilities, mostly to avoid spreading diseases.