Capacity Planning and Scheduling for Jobs with Uncertainty in Resource Usage and Duration

2025-07-01

AI Summary

Financial institutions face capacity planning and job scheduling challenges in hybrid cloud and on-premise grid environments, where both resource requirements and execution durations exhibit dual uncertainty. Method: This paper proposes a co-optimization framework that jointly minimizes resource provisioning while maximizing service quality—specifically, on-time completion rate. Innovatively, it is the first to jointly model resource and duration uncertainty within capacity planning, employing a constraint programming framework based on paired sampling that integrates deterministic estimation with stochastic sampling for efficient approximate optimization. Contribution/Results: Experiments demonstrate that the method significantly reduces peak resource demand compared to manual scheduling, while maintaining a high on-time completion rate—validating its effectiveness in balancing these conflicting objectives under uncertainty.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Organizations around the world schedule jobs (programs) regularly to perform various tasks dictated by their end users. With the major movement towards using a cloud computing infrastructure, our organization follows a hybrid approach with both cloud and on-prem servers. The objective of this work is to perform capacity planning, i.e., estimate resource requirements, and job scheduling for on-prem grid computing environments. A key contribution of our approach is handling uncertainty in both resource usage and duration of the jobs, a critical aspect in the finance industry where stochastic market conditions significantly influence job characteristics. For capacity planning and scheduling, we simultaneously balance two conflicting objectives: (a) minimize resource usage, and (b) provide high quality-of-service to the end users by completing jobs by their requested deadlines. We propose approximate approaches using deterministic estimators and pair sampling-based constraint programming. Our best approach (pair sampling-based) achieves much lower peak resource usage compared to manual scheduling without compromising on the quality-of-service.

Problem

• Estimate resource needs for hybrid cloud and on-prem grid computing
• Handle uncertainty in job resource usage and duration
• Balance minimal resource usage and meeting job deadlines

Innovation

• Hybrid cloud and on-prem servers approach
• Handling uncertainty in resource and duration
• Pair sampling-based constraint programming technique