Ajith Abraham & Fatos Xhafa 
Metaheuristics for Scheduling in Distributed Computing Environments 

Grid computing has emerged as one of the most promising computing paradigms of the new millennium! Achieving high performance Grid computing requires techniques to efficiently and adaptively allocate jobs and applications to available resources in a large scale, highly heterogenous and dynamic environment. This volume presents meta-heuristics approaches for Grid scheduling problems. Due to the complex nature of the problem, meta-heuristics are primary techniques for the design and implementation of efficient Grid schedulers. The volume brings new ideas, analysis, implementations and evaluation of meta-heuristic techniques for Grid scheduling, which make this volume novel in several aspects. The 14 chapters of this volume have identified several important formulations of the problem, which we believe will serve as a reference for the researchers in the Grid computing community. Important features include the detailed overview of the various novel metaheuristic scheduling approaches, excellent coverage of timely, advanced scheduling topics, state-of-the-art theoretical research and application developments and chapters authored by pioneers in the field. Academics, scientists as well as engineers engaged in research, development and scheduling will find the comprehensive coverage of this book invaluable.