TIAN Xi, SUN Danfeng, WU Huifeng, HU Junjie
Vision-guided flexible manufacturing systems are progressively integrating multiple computation-intensive tasks, including visual perception, intelligent algorithms, and real-time motion control. Therefore, heterogeneous computing units must be incorporated. However, the dependencies among tasks are complex, and the execution efficiency varies considerably across different computing resources. To improve the overall task execution efficiency, it is essential to optimize the task execution order and computing resource allocation via task scheduling algorithms. Existing heterogeneous scheduling methods mainly fall into two categories: rule-based heuristics and meta-heuristics. The former suffer from limited search capability, whereas the latter still has room for improvement in in both search-space exploration and solution-quality enhancement. To address these issues, a hierarchical heuristic algorithm (HHA) is proposed for DAG task scheduling. Through the collaboration of a genetic algorithm and a discrete ant colony optimization algorithm (DACO), the proposed approach achieves achieves stage-wise optimization of task scheduling solutions. While ensuring scheduling feasibility, the proposed method effectively improves the solution quality. Comparative experimental results demonstrate that, compared with typical algorithms such as GA-DE, NGA, HGA, and HEFT, the proposed HHA achieves performance improvements of 0.77%, 0.87%, 4.82%, and 8.59% in terms of makespan, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in heterogeneous control system scheduling problems.