Role-Based User Allocation Driven by Criticality in Edge Computing

Edge computing is a promising solution to enabling highly accessible resources and latency-sensitive services for nearby users. In public safety, it can provide critical support for urban crowd/hazard management services, such as real-time path planning, hazard warning, etc. In a crowd/hazard scenario, crowds can be allocated to nearby edge servers for obtaining real-time support, e.g., evacuation instructions for those who want to evacuate and crowd flow updates for those who want to rescue, etc. In such scenarios, the behaviors of different roles (like rescuers and evacuees) and the positive/negative interactions among them must be considered in user allocation for reducing injuries and fatalities. In this paper, these issues are defined as a novel Role-Based Criticality (RBC) model to describe the fatal risks of different roles in the crowd/hazard scenarios. Based on the model, the Role-Based User Allocation (RUA) problem is formulated. To tackle this problem, we devise an optimal solution named RUA-ILP based on Integer Linear Programming. To accommodate large-scale scenarios, we propose two representative approximate approach named RUA-A and RUA-GA to ensure efficient and effectiveness user allocation respectively. They can maximize the overall role-based criticality which can reduce injuries and fatalities in crowd/hazard scenarios by theoretical proofing and extensive experiments conducted on a real-world dataset.