Quality-Cost Trade-off on Constructing Logical Views for Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

With the development of sensing technologies, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, edge computing paradigm, vehicular cyber-physical systems (VCPS) are emerging as the most fundamental platform for realizing future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). In particular, the construction of logical views at the edge nodes based on heterogeneous information sensing and uploading are critical to the realization of VCPS. However, a higher-quality view in terms of timeliness and accuracy may require higher cost on sensing and uploading. In view of this, this paper is dedicated to striking a balance between the quality and the cost for constructing logical views of VCPS. Specifically, we first derive an information sensing model based on multi-class M/G/1 priority queue and a data uploading model based on reliability-guaranteed vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. On this basis, we design two metrics, namely, age of view (AoV) and cost of view (CoV), simultaneously. Then, we formulate a bi-objective problem to maximize the AoV and minimize the CoV. Further, we propose a distributed distributional deep deterministic policy gradient (D4PG) solution to determine sensing information, frequency, uploading priority, transmission power, and V2I bandwidth. Finally, we build a simulation model and give a comprehensive performance evaluation, and the simulation results conclusively demonstrate the superiority of the proposed solution.