Rescheduling strategy of cloud service based on shuffled frog leading algorithm and Nash equilibrium

When a conflict or plan change occurs in the process of cloud service execution, if the initial scheme is not rescheduled in time, it can lead to a delivery delay and a series of nonlinear losses. The cloud service rescheduling (CSRS) problem is considered as a particularly hard combinatorial optimization problem with multi-participants, which is significantly different from traditional flow shop rescheduling problem. It is difficult to coordinate the relationship of service suppliers and construct a reward mechanism to encourage them to participate in the rescheduling. According to the various strategies of service suppliers that do or do not participate in the rescheduling, a game theory model was constructed. The main aim of this paper is to explore how to minimize the reward of suppliers and ensure that the game model develops in a desired direction. Hence, a novel hybrid approach using shuffled frog leading algorithm (SFLA) and Nash equilibrium (NE) theory was proposed to solve the CSRS problem. In addition, we carried out a case study to demonstrate that the SFLA and NE approaches can be implemented for realistically sized problem sets and that the cost savings are significant.