Enhancing Delay-Sensitive Task Offloading: A Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for MEC-Based AIoT Systems.

Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) systems are widely utilized in various domains such as smart logistics and smart health. In AIoT systems, computational tasks earmarked for offloading by IoT devices often have different task priorities and heterogeneous resource requirements. However, these factors will affect the QoS of the solution and the task response time. Therefore, motivated by a typical smart warehouse system, a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) based distributed task offloading framework is proposed. Afterward, a delaysensitive mixed-integer programming model is defined to address the imbalanced utilization of computing resources between edge and cloud servers during the offloading process. Finally, based on the attention mechanism, a Priority-Driven Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm (PDMA-DRL) is proposed to fulfill real-time resource requirements while reducing the task response time. The PDMA-DRL algorithm consists of two agents, and each agent corresponds to a sub-problem. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed PDMA-DRL algorithm can outperform representative existing methods in generating delay-sensitive task offloading plans and effectively reducing the task response time.