ReflexPilot: Startup-Aware Dependent Task Scheduling Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Edge-Cloud Collaborative Computing

With the increasing number of devices, the demand for data computation is growing rapidly. In edge-cloud collaborative computing, tasks can be scheduled to servers as interdependent subtasks, enhancing performance through parallel computing. A task is executed in an executor, which must first initialize the runtime environment in a process called task startup. However, most existing research neglects the reuse of executors, leading to considerable delays during task startup. To address this issue, we model the edge-cloud collaborative task scheduling scenario considering executor reuse, task startup, and dependency relationships. We then formulate the dependent task scheduling problem with task startup. To meet real-time demands in edge-cloud collaborative computing, we propose ReflexPilot, an online task scheduling architecture featuring executor management. Building on this architecture, we introduce OTSA-PPO, a task scheduling algorithm based on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and EMA, an advanced executor allocation algorithm. Under constraints of computational and communication resources, ReflexPilot leverages OTSA-PPO for online scheduling of dependent tasks based on current states, while EMA pre-creates and reuses executors to reduce the average task completion time. Extensive simulations demonstrate that ReflexPilot significantly reduces the average task completion time by 31% to 71% compared with existing baselines.