Edge computing breaks with traditional autoscaling due to strict resource constraints, thus, motivating more flexible scaling behaviors using multiple elasticity dimensions. This work introduces an agent-based autoscaling framework that dynamically adjusts both hardware resources and internal service configurations to maximize requirements fulfillment in constrained environments. We compare four types of scaling agents: Active Inference, Deep Q Network, Analysis of Structural Knowledge, and Deep Active Inference, using two real-world processing services running in parallel: YOLOv8 for visual recognition and OpenCV for QR code detection. Results show all agents achieve acceptable SLO performance with varying convergence patterns. While the Deep Q Network benefits from pre-training, the structural analysis converges quickly, and the deep active inference agent combines theoretical foundations with practical scalability advantages. Our findings provide evidence for the viability of multi-dimensional agent-based autoscaling for edge environments and encourage future work in this research direction.
@article{arxiv.2506.10420,
title = {Multi-dimensional Autoscaling of Processing Services: A Comparison of Agent-based Methods},
author = {Boris Sedlak and Alireza Furutanpey and Zihang Wang and Víctor Casamayor Pujol and Schahram Dustdar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.10420},
year = {2026}
}