The emergence of intelligent applications has fostered the development of a task-oriented communication paradigm, where a comprehensive, universal, and practical metric is crucial for unleashing the potential of this paradigm. To this end, we introduce an innovative metric, the Task-oriented Age of Information (TAoI), to measure whether the content of information is relevant to the system task, thereby assisting the system in efficiently completing designated tasks. Also, we study the TAoI in a remote monitoring system, whose task is to identify target images and transmit them for subsequent analysis. We formulate the dynamic transmission problem as a Semi-Markov Decision Process (SMDP) and transform it into an equivalent Markov Decision Process (MDP) to minimize TAoI and find the optimal transmission policy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the optimal strategy is a threshold-based policy regarding TAoI and propose a relative value iteration algorithm based on the threshold structure to obtain the optimal transmission policy. Finally, simulation results show the superior performance of the optimal transmission policy compared to the baseline policies.

翻译：智能应用的出现推动了面向任务的通信范式的发展，其中需要一个全面、通用且实用的度量标准来释放该范式的潜力。为此，我们引入了一种创新的度量标准——面向任务的信息年龄（TAoI），用以衡量信息内容是否与系统任务相关，从而协助系统高效完成指定任务。同时，我们在一个远程监控系统中研究了TAoI，该系统的任务是识别目标图像并传输它们以进行后续分析。我们将动态传输问题建模为一个半马尔可夫决策过程（SMDP），并将其转化为等价的马尔可夫决策过程（MDP），以最小化TAoI并找到最优传输策略。此外，我们证明了最优策略是关于TAoI的基于阈值的策略，并提出了一种基于阈值结构的相对值迭代算法来获得最优传输策略。最后，仿真结果表明，与基线策略相比，最优传输策略具有更优越的性能。