Collaborative Edge Intelligence Service Provision in Blockchain Empowered Urban Rail Transit Systems

With the advancement of urban rail transits (URTs), the demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-based URTs services grows exponentially. Edge intelligence (EI) leverages computing resources on the network edge to provide real-time intelligent services in close proximity. As it enables fast distributed learning, EI is envisioned to be a potential component of URTs, and ideal EI service provision is a critical concern for the intelligent development of URTs. The existing EI-related research concentrates on the computation offloading of general AI-based tasks, whereas both the edge server deployment and AI model training process are not explicitly designed for URTs. The URTs AI service characteristics, such as model training demand, priority, and security, are largely ignored. In this article, we propose a novel collaborative EI service provision framework for URTs. Blockchain is used along with the EI server to construct a trusted computing infrastructure. To address the EI service credit crisis, a blockchain-based trust management mechanism, including short-term reward incentives and long-term reputation evaluation, is designed in the trusted computing infrastructure. An HRL-based collaborative training service optimization model is proposed to improve the learning efficiency and edge resource utilization rate in URTs. Specifically, the proposed two-stage collaborative optimization model jointly considers high-level service scheduling and low-level task offloading. In addition, we present an intelligent train control model based on the state-of-the-art decision transformer (DT), with the training service as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed collaborative EI service provision. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed EI service provision framework can provide trusted, efficient, and high-quality AI training services, simultaneously improving URTs operational efficiency.