Edge-Driven Industrial Computing Power Networks: Digital Twin-Empowered Service Provisioning by Hybrid Soft Actor-Critic

With the proliferation of data-intensive industrial applications, the collaboration of computing powers among standalone edge servers is vital to provision such services for smart devices. In this paper, we propose an edge-driven industrial computing power network (CPN) by orchestrating the computing and network resources of edge servers through the centralized resource scheduling and decentralized task computing. However, efficient task offloading and collaborative processing is challenging, which requires higher degrees of network automation and intelligence. Therefore, we incorporate digital twins (DTs) into the edge-driven CPN architecture, where the DTs are created as the digital replicas to assist both the computation offloading and collaborative processing. A joint optimization problem of the computing power assignment, service association, task partition, and transmit power control is formulated for maximizing the system average weighted utility. Due to the temporal-spatial variability of tasks and the resulted dynamic environment, we transform the original problem as a Markov decision process aiming at maximizing the long-term average weighted utility. To efficiently handle the high-dimensional discrete-continuous action space, a hybrid soft actor-critic based deep reinforcement learning algorithm is developed for optimizing the joint design. Simulation results validate the superiority of our proposed algorithm over the benchmarks, showing the significant gains obtained by integrating DTs into the edge-driven CPN.