Intelligent Service Chain Orchestration and Resource Allocation in End–Edge Collaborative IIoT Using Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization

The massive heterogeneous data streams and stringent low-latency requirements in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) pose new challenges for edge network resource management. This paper addresses the joint optimization problem of Service Function Chain (SFC) orchestration and resource allocation in edge gateway-assisted IIoT networks, formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to minimize end-to-end latency and energy consumption while satisfying quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. To tackle this NP-hard problem and the challenges of partial observability in distributed environments, we propose the SFC Orchestration and Resource Allocation-based Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (SORA-MAPPO) algorithm. The algorithm adopts a centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm with an intelligent agent cooperation mechanism. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in complex IIoT scenarios.