Utility-Driven Collaborative Task Computation Transfer for Vehicular Digital Twin Networks

Vehicular digital twin networks (VDTNs) are an emerging paradigm integrating physical vehicular networks with their virtual digital twins (DTs) mirror, enabling real-time mapping, simulation, and optimization of complex systems. However, constrained resources, high data synchronization costs, and dynamic network conditions in vehicular networks may degrade the performance of DT. We consider the interaction between task performance guarantees and node resource constraints to adaptively determine collaborative task computation transfer optimization in VDTNs. In this article, we design a semantic-aware multitask VDTNs model, where vehicles extract semantic representations to achieve lightweight data transmission and efficient DT synchronization. We formulate a problem of maximizing the average utility of DT tasks by jointly considering the synchronization performance of DT tasks and the resource consumption among heterogeneous nodes. To solve the formulated problem, we develop a dynamic collaborative task computation transfer algorithm involving the high mobility of vehicles and heterogeneous resources of nodes. The algorithm is optimized in two phases to maximize average utility. A coarse-grained policy space is first obtained through an adaptive multiagent deep reinforcement learning approach, aiming to alleviate the policy space explosion caused by dynamic task requirements and heterogeneous node collaboration. Subsequently, a fine-grained policy is derived via a resource-aware refinement mechanism. Numerical results validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed algorithm.