Cooperative Digital Healthcare Task Scheduling and Resource Management in Edge Intelligence Systems

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital healthcare applications has led to an increasing demand for efficient and reliable task scheduling and resource management in edge computing environments. However, the limited resources of edge servers and the need to process delay-sensitive healthcare tasks pose significant challenges. Existing solutions often need help to balance the trade-off between system cost and quality of service, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel cooperative task scheduling and resource management framework for digital healthcare applications in edge intelligence systems. Our approach leverages a two-step optimization strategy that combines the Multi-armed Combinatorial Selection Problem (MCSP) for task scheduling and the Sequential Markov Decision Process (SMDP) with alternative reward estimation for computation offloading. The MCSP-based scheduling algorithm efficiently explores the combinatorial task scheduling space to minimize healthcare task completion time and costs. The SMDP-based offloading strategy incorporates alternative reward estimation to improve robustness against dynamic variations in the system environment. Extensive simulations using real-world healthcare data demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed framework compared to state-of-the-art baselines, achieving significant improvements in cost, task success rate, and fairness. The proposed approach enables reliable and efficient digital healthcare services in resource-constrained edge computing environments.