Sustainable Graph Analytics Workload Scheduling with Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning in Edge-Cloud Systems

Abstract: Graph analytics powers modern intelligent systems such as smart cities, cyber-physical infrastructure, IoT security, and large-scale social networks. As these workloads scale in complexity, their execution in heterogeneous edge-cloud environments results in higher energy use and carbon emission footprint. To address this challenge, we propose MERSEM, a multi-objective evolutionary reinforcement learning framework for sustainable edge-cloud system management. MERSEM integrates evolutionary search with reinforcement learning (RL) to solve the problem of graph workload allocation and scheduling. The evolutionary component explores diverse global solutions, while the RL agent refines decisions through adaptive local optimization. The framework is designed to jointly minimize service-level agreement (SLA) violations and carbon emissions by considering dynamic carbon intensity, resource heterogeneity, and workload characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that MERSEM outperforms the state-of-the-art with up to 45% SLA violation reductions and up to 12% carbon emission reductions.