Edge Intelligent Joint Optimization for Lifetime and Latency in Large-Scale Cyber–Physical Systems

In recent years, the exploration on large-scale cyber–physical systems (CPSs) has become a fertile research field of significant impact. Large-scale CPS applications cover not only manufacturing and production areas but also daily living domains. Traditional solutions dedicated for large-scale CPSs mainly concentrate on the service latency or reliability optimization, but neglect the resultant negative impact on system lifetime. In this article, we conduct the first study on jointly optimizing the service latency and system lifetime subject to the constraints of reliability, energy consumption, and schedulability for large-scale CPSs. We propose an edge intelligent solution composed of offline and online phases. At the offline phase, the long short-term memory (LSTM) technique is leveraged to predict task offloading rates at individual user groups. Afterward, the multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with dual local search (DLS-MOEA) is exploited to determine optimal system static settings of computation offloading mapping and task replication number. At the online phase, an affinity-driven scheme incurring minimal system dynamic overheads is designed to deal with the inherent mobility of terminal users. We also build an algorithm validation platform upon which extensive simulation experiments are carried out. Experimental results show that our offline and online schemes outperform the state-of-the-art benchmarking methods by 27.1% and 43.5%, respectively.