Scheduling multiprocessor tasks with genetic algorithms

In the multiprocessor scheduling problem, a given program is to be scheduled in a given multiprocessor system such that the program's execution time is minimized. This problem being very hard to solve exactly, many heuristic methods for finding a suboptimal schedule exist. We propose a new combined approach, where a genetic algorithm is improved with the introduction of some knowledge about the scheduling problem represented by the use of a list heuristic in the crossover and mutation genetic operations. This knowledge-augmented genetic approach is empirically compared with a "pure" genetic algorithm and with a "pure" list heuristic, both from the literature. Results of the experiments carried out with synthetic instances of the scheduling problem show that our knowledge-augmented algorithm produces much better results in terms of quality of solutions, although being slower in terms of execution time.