A Bilevel Periodically Interactive Evolutionary Algorithm for Personalized Service Customization in Wireless-Powered Cooperative MEC

This article addresses the pricing scheme in a wireless-powered cooperative mobile edge computing (WP-CoMEC) system, focusing on personalized service customization. Traditional pricing schemes in such systems often assume a passive mode, with the service provider leading, and the device owner following. However, with the rise of personalized requirements, this paper proposes a novel approach where the device owner becomes an active participant in the pricing scheme, leading to personally customized services. The proposed pricing model formulates a bilevel multi-objective optimization problem, considering task offloading, resource allocation, and energy harvesting. This comprehensive approach ensures a more holistic optimization process. To address the computational challenges posed by the bilevel pricing model, this article proposes a bilevel periodically interactive evolutionary algorithm (BL-PIEA), which efficiently handles mixed variables, complex objective conflicts, and the inner nested structure of the bilevel pricing model. The proposed BL-PIEA is tested on ten instances, and the results indicate that BL-PIEA can effectively solve the proposed pricing model, showcasing superior performance in terms of reduced run time and saved evaluation budgets compared to other algorithms. With the proposed bilevel pricing model solved by BL-PIEA, the service provider can make out better pricing schemes that satisfy the device owner's requirements, so as to achieve a good personalized service customization.