DI-WOA: Symmetry-Aware Dual-Improved Whale Optimization for Monetized Cloud Compute Scheduling with Dual-Rollback Constraint Handling

With the continuous growth in the scale of engineering simulation and intelligent manufacturing workflows, more and more problem-solving tasks are migrating to cloud computing platforms to obtain elastic computing power. However, a core operational challenge for cloud platforms lies in the difficulty of stably obtaining high-quality scheduling solutions that are both efficient and free of symmetric redundancy, due to the coupling of multiple constraints, partial resource interchangeability, inconsistent multi-objective evaluation scales, and heterogeneous resource fluctuations. To address this, this paper proposes a Dual-Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm (DI-WOA) accompanied by a modeling framework featuring discrete–continuous divide-and-conquer modeling, a unified monetization mechanism of the objective function, and separation of soft/hard constraints; its iterative trajectory follows an augmented Lagrangian dual-rollback mechanism, while being rooted in a three-layer “discrete gene–real-valued encoding–decoder” structure. Scalability experiments show that as the number of tasks J increases, the DI-WOA ranks optimal or sub-optimal at most scale points, indicating its effectiveness in reducing unified billing costs even under intensified task coupling and resource contention. Ablation experiment results demonstrate that the complete DI-WOA achieves final objective values (OBJ) 8.33%, 5.45%, and 13.31% lower than the baseline, the variant without dual update (w/o dual), and the variant without perturbation (w/o perturb), respectively, significantly enhancing convergence performance and final solution quality on this scheduling model. In robustness experiments, the DI-WOA exhibits the lowest or second-lowest OBJ and soft constraint violation, indicating higher controllability under perturbations. In multi-workload generalization experiments, the DI-WOA achieves the optimal or sub-optimal mean OBJ across all scenarios with H = 3/4, leading the sub-optimal algorithm by up to 13.85%, demonstrating good adaptability to workload variations. A comprehensive analysis of the experimental results reveals that the DI-WOA holds practical significance for stably solving high-quality scheduling problems that are efficient and free of symmetric redundancy in complex and diverse environments.