Dynamic Human Digital Twin Deployment at the Edge for Task Execution: A Two-Timescale Accuracy-Aware Online Optimization

Human digital twin (HDT) is an emerging paradigm that bridges physical twins (PTs) with powerful virtual twins (VTs) for assisting complex task executions in human-centric services. In this paper, we study a two-timescale online optimization for building HDT under an end-edge-cloud collaborative framework. As a unique feature of HDT, we consider that PTs’ corresponding VTs are deployed on edge servers, consisting of not only generic models placed by downloading experiential knowledge from the cloud but also customized models updated by collecting personalized data from end devices. To maximize task execution accuracy with stringent energy and delay constraints, and by taking into account HDT's inherent mobility and status variation uncertainties, we jointly and dynamically optimize VTs’ construction and PTs’ task offloading, along with communication and computation resource allocations. Observing that decision variables are asynchronous with different triggers, we propose a novel two-timescale accuracy-aware online optimization approach (TACO). Specifically, TACO utilizes an improved Lyapunov method to decompose the problem into multiple instant ones, and then leverages piecewise McCormick envelopes and block coordinate descent based algorithms, addressing two timescales alternately. Theoretical analyses and simulations show that the proposed approach can reach asymptotic optimum within a polynomial-time complexity, and demonstrate its superiority over counterparts.