Hybrid Edge-Cloud Collaborator Resource Scheduling Approach Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning and Multiobjective Optimization

Collaborative resource scheduling between edge terminals and cloud centers is regarded as a promising means of effectively completing computing tasks and enhancing quality of service. In this paper, to further improve the achievable performance, the edge cloud resource scheduling (ECRS) problem is transformed into a multi-objective Markov decision process based on task dependency and features extraction. A multi-objective ECRS model is proposed by considering the task completion time, cost, energy consumption and system reliability as the four objectives. Furthermore, a hybrid approach based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and multi-objective optimization are employed in our work. Specifically, DRL preprocesses the workflow, and a multi-objective optimization method strives to find the Pareto-optimal workflow scheduling decision. Various experiments are performed on three real data sets with different numbers of tasks. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed hybrid DRL and multi-objective optimization design outperforms existing design approaches.