A Trust-Aware Extension to a Reinforcement Learning Hyper-Heuristic Framework for Multi-Objective Scientific Workflow Scheduling

Saeed, HA, Al-Janabi, STF, Yassen, ET and Aldhaibani, OA ORCID: 0000-0003-0235-2862 (2026) A Trust-Aware Extension to a Reinforcement Learning Hyper-Heuristic Framework for Multi-Objective Scientific Workflow Scheduling. Computers, 15 (8). ISSN 2073-431X

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Abstract

A reinforcement learning hyper-heuristic framework for multi-objective scientific workflow scheduling selects among five meta-heuristic optimisers and tunes their control parameters under a Nash Social Welfare reward over makespan, cost, security, and resource utilisation. In its base form it treats security as a static virtual-machine attribute and admits all candidates unconditionally. This paper contributes the mechanism design required to integrate two security-realism layers into the scheduling loop without redesigning the reward: a five-stage zero-trust admission pipeline, a bounded non-stationary per-machine dynamic trust signal, a state-vector augmentation that exposes trust to the agent, and a coupling that attenuates the effective security level seen by the security utility. The two layers act at distinct timescales: admission is a provisioning-time gate on a machine’s structural compliance, whereas the trust signal evolves per decision epoch for the machines already admitted, so static admission and dynamic trust coexist by construction. We evaluate three hyper-heuristic agents on 20 Pegasus workflow instances under both a trust suite and a trust-free baseline. The base framework establishes a sharp separation between the hyper-heuristic and direct task-to-machine RL families; we treat this as an inherited property and ask a different question: can the two security-realism layers be integrated without disturbing it? Across 20 Pegasus instances and three HH-RL agents, the family-level separation is preserved. Under a reproducible evaluation protocol—five independently seeded repeats of the full paired comparison, 100 greedy inference episodes per (agent, workflow, suite) cell, with per-workflow deltas averaged across repeats before testing—the trust extension imposes a small, heterogeneous absorption cost: the median per-workflow shift in Nash reward is −0.24, −0.24, and −0.05 for PDQN, DQNHH, and QLHH respectively, an order of magnitude below the absolute reward levels. The shift is statistically significant for DQNHH (two-sided Wilcoxon p = 0.0014, rank-biserial r = −0.77), marginal for PDQN (p = 0.058), and absent for QLHH (p = 0.18). The security utility stays above 0.91 on every instance, and the family-level scaling robustness is preserved intact. The contribution is therefore a drop-in mechanism whose cost is bounded and small relative to the between-family separation—with a robust workflow-level heterogeneity: the parameterised agent converts the trust signal into consistent gains on the largest DAGs (mean +1.28 on Sipht_1000 and Inspiral_1000 across the five repeats) while paying a small cost on typical instances.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	reinforcement learning; hyper-heuristic; zero-trust security; dynamic trust; scientific workflow scheduling; 46 Information and Computing Sciences; 4602 Artificial Intelligence; 40 Engineering; 46 Information and computing sciences
Subjects:	Q Science > Q Science (General) Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Divisions:	Computer Science and Mathematics
Publisher:	MDPI AG
Date of acceptance:	30 July 2026
Date of first compliant Open Access:	11 September 2026
Date Deposited:	11 Sep 2026 14:09
Last Modified:	11 Sep 2026 14:09
DOI or ID number:	10.3390/computers15080505
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29396

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