-->PONE-D-25-38807-->-->Multiobjective dynamic resource allocation in cloud computing using Harris Hawk optimization algorithm (MDLB-HHO)-->-->PLOS One

Dear Dr. C M,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

-->-->While both reviewers recognize the relevance of your work, they've identified significant concerns requiring major revision particularly computational complexity analysis, mathematical rigor, and practical feasibility discussion. Please address all reviewer comments thoroughly before resubmission.-->--> -->-->

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 12 2026 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript

-->

• A letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Dinesh Kumar Nishad, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please note that PLOS One has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, we expect all author-generated code to be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work. Please review our guidelines at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/materials-and-software-sharing#loc-sharing-code and ensure that your code is shared in a way that follows best practice and facilitates reproducibility and reuse.

3. Please amend your list of authors on the manuscript to ensure that each author is linked to an affiliation. Authors’ affiliations should reflect the institution where the work was done (if authors moved subsequently, you can also list the new affiliation stating “current affiliation:….” as necessary).

4. Please ensure that you refer to Figures 4 and 8 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figures.

5. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Tables 1, 2, and 3 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Tables.

6. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information.

7. If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. -->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Partly

**********

-->2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #1: 1. What are the motivations of researchers to consider Harris Hawks optimization besides many Reinforcement learning approaches?

2. What are your inferences from the existing literature?

3. Mathematical modeling is weak in the manuscript.

4. Algorithm is not rigorously explained.

5. Complexity of the algorithm haven't identified but they have done the ablation study.

6. Many of the authors have already addressed these metrics what is your thought on this?

7. Is your approach is working well with these given settings or it can be adaptable to any type of workload. Please justify. If so, please give us the reasons.

Reviewer #2: The paper tackles an interesting, highly relevant, and complex issue: multi-objective dynamic load balancing in cloud computing, using a meta-heuristic approach called MDLB-HHO. It shows promising simulation results that outperform existing methods. The literature review clearly identifies the gap in applying HHO to this specific problem.

However, concerns about the practical feasibility and cost of the solution are significant and cannot be ignored. Especially for this journal, the authors must provide a detailed Computational Complexity Analysis (including both time and space complexity) of the MDLB-HHO algorithm and discuss its implications for a real-time system. They should also compare its computational cost to that of other algorithms. Additionally, the authors should include a discussion on the practical challenges of deployment and the limitations of relying solely on simulations, outlining future work to test the algorithm on a real or emulated cloud infrastructure with production-level traffic characteristics. The paper should be revised to clearly explain the novelty of the multiobjective fitness function, its parameters, and how it effectively balances the conflicting objectives mentioned (e.g., resource utilization versus response time). On the other hand,

The manuscript should be accepted for publication, pending a thorough revision to address deficiencies.

**********

-->6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?  For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.-->

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Carlos Jaime BARRIOS HERNANDEZ

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

To ensure your figures meet our technical requirements, please review our figure guidelines: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures

You may also use PLOS’s free figure tool, NAAS, to help you prepare publication quality figures: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures#loc-tools-for-figure-preparation.

NAAS will assess whether your figures meet our technical requirements by comparing each figure against our figure specifications.

Multiobjective dynamic resource allocation in cloud computing using Harris Hawk optimization algorithm (MDLB-HHO)

PONE-D-25-38807R1

Dear Dr. C M,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Dinesh Kumar Nishad, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.-->

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

**********

-->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. -->

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: Partly

**********

-->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

-->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: No

**********

-->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

-->6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: 1. The Abstract could be more clear and concise.I suggest the authors to organize and rewrite the abstract.

2. The section "Main Contribution of the research": the substantive contribution of this paper has not been fully explained, in other words, this paper appears to be lack of novelty and significant academic contribution.

3. Some of the conceptual objects involved in this article, such as virtual machines, tasks, etc., are too abstract, which greatly affects the scientificity and practicality of this article. It is suggested that the authors of this paper combine practical cloud computing scenarios, such as financial risk control, medical image analysis, and recommendation systems, to deepen this research.

4. Data Availability: Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated of analyzed during the current study. This statement means that the innovation of this paper is very very weak. As a paper about cloud computing, the authors could produce massive data from different scenarios and workflows, and this maybe the most important way to deal with practical problems in the domain of Dynamic Resource Allocation.

**********

-->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?  For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.-->

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes: Xiaoyou Yu

**********