Duration-Aware Task Assignment for Heterogeneous Mobility Users in Crowdsensing

Abstract

This paper investigates the duration-aware task assignment problem for heterogeneous mobility users in MCS (DTAH problem). There are two types of users in MCS, vehicle users and pedestrian users. The vehicle user gets to the task fast, but the task duration is short. Pedestrian user meets the task duration limit, but it takes a long time to reach the task. Given a set of tasks and two types of users, each user, and each task has a duration limit. The DTAH problem is how to assign tasks to maximize the utility of the system. We prove that the DTAH problem is NP-hard by reducing the weighted maximum set coverage problem to the DTAH problem. Then, we solve the problem from a pedestrian perspective and a vehicle perspective. From the pedestrian user perspective, we propose a pedestrian user task assignment (PTA) algorithm based on the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm. From the vehicle user perspective, we propose a greedy vehicle user task assignment (VTA) algorithm. We prove that the VTA algorithm can obtain the approximate ratio of 1-1/e to the optimal value. Finally, we design the heterogeneous user task assignment (HTA) algorithm based on these PTA and VTA algorithms. Extensive experiments have proved that our proposed HTA algorithm achieves more efficient performance than other comparison algorithms.