Toward Intelligent and Adaptive Task Scheduling for 6G: An Intent-Driven Framework

A cloud network schedules diverse tasks to multi-access edge computing (MEC) or cloud platforms within dynamic industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The scheduling is influenced by the diverse intents of different parties, including the time-sensitive nature of device-generated tasks and the energy efficiency of servers. The complexity of this problem under dynamic network conditions is underscored by its nature as a Markov state transition process, typically classified as NP-hard. We introduce an intent-driven intelligent task scheduling approach (IITSA), which models a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and introduces a multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) method. We introduce a dynamic adaptive mechanism to effectively address conflicts arising from the temporal requirements and energy limitations associated with various tasks on MEC servers. This mechanism enhances the reward function of MAPPO, for which we offer comprehensive mathematical analysis to validate its convergence performance. Simulation results showcase that our proposed IITSA effectively achieves a harmonious trade-off between time-sensitive demands and infrastructure energy efficiency while exhibiting high adaptability. Compared to state-of-the-art algorithms like MADDPG and QMIX, IITSA reduces energy consumption by 11.68% and 7.07%, and enhances on-time completion numbers for time-sensitive tasks by 18.33% and 12.17%, respectively.