An Economic Investment Strategy: Enhanced Golden Sine Optimization Algorithm for Global Optimization and Practical Engineering Applications

Abstract

Cloud task scheduling is a critical optimization problem in cloud computing environments, aiming to allocate computational tasks to appropriate virtual machines while reducing execution time, balancing resource load, and minimizing scheduling cost. However, due to the high dimensionality, nonlinear characteristics, and complex constraints of cloud scheduling scenarios, traditional optimization methods often struggle to obtain high-quality solutions efficiently. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Multi-strategy Improved Golden Sine Optimization Algorithm (MIGoldSA) for global optimization and cloud task scheduling problems. First, an adaptive chaotic opposition initialization strategy is incorporated to improve the distribution quality and diversity of the initial population. Second, a dynamic elite-guided sine evolution strategy is designed to reduce the dependence on a single best individual and improve the coordination between global exploration and local exploitation. Third, an Economic Investment Strategy is introduced to adaptively allocate search efforts according to the optimization potential of individuals. To verify the effectiveness of MIGoldSA, extensive experiments are conducted on the IEEE CEC2017 and CEC2022 benchmark suites and compared with nine advanced optimization algorithms. The results show that MIGoldSA obtains the best or tied-best mean fitness values on 60 out of 84 benchmark cases, accounting for 71.43% of all test cases. In the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, MIGoldSA achieves 662 wins, 57 ties, and 37 losses among 756 pairwise comparisons, corresponding to an overall win rate of 87.57% and a non-inferiority rate of 95.11%. In addition, the Friedman mean ranks of MIGoldSA are 1.47, 2.00, 3.98, and 4.17 under the four benchmark settings, which are reduced by 85.26%, 79.94%, 45.25%, and 42.32%, respectively, compared with the original GoldSA. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applied to cloud task scheduling problems under different task scales. The experimental results show that MIGoldSA maintains competitive time-cost performance and achieves clear reductions in load cost, price cost, and comprehensive scheduling cost. Compared with the original GoldSA, the normalized comprehensive scheduling cost is reduced by approximately 9–14% in small-scale scenarios and approximately 18–21% in large-scale scenarios. Meanwhile, the normalized load cost and price cost are reduced by about 18–25% and 10–18%, respectively, and the time cost shows an approximately 8–12% reduction in large-scale scheduling scenarios. These quantitative results demonstrate that MIGoldSA can improve the optimization accuracy, statistical robustness, and overall scheduling cost efficiency of the original GoldSA on most tested problems.