A novel continual reinforcement learning-based expert system for self-optimization of soft real-time systems

Virtual globes are soft real-time systems, which stream multi-resolution data sets and render world-scale landscapes in real-time. Such systems require an adaptation mechanism to fulfill user and quality of experience (QoE) requirements. Configuration and tuning of parameters to optimize system performance is challenging due to run-time uncertainties. In this work, we propose a continual reinforcement learning-based expert system for self-optimization of a soft real-time system to meet user and quality objectives. The proposed system is capable of learning continuously by utilizing the previously learned knowledge to fulfill adaptation requirements. The proposed managing system interacts with a managed system and evolves a knowledge base of adaptation rules for run-time optimization of the managed system to meet user and quality objectives. We devise a learning classifier system for the evolution, storage, and transfer of adaptation rules using a code fragments-based rich encoding scheme. We transform user goals, system states, and execution environment conditions into observable states. We validated the proposed system for the same and cross-domain knowledge transfer and reuse scenarios for different user goals and execution environments. The results of the proposed system are compared with baseline and state-of-the-art methods where the proposed system outperformed the methods in terms of adaptation accuracy.