Market-Driven Optimal Task Assignment in Spatial Crowdsouring

Abstract

With the popularity of mobile devices and Online To Offline (O2O) marketing model, various spatial crowdsourcing platforms, such as Gigwalk, WeGoLook, TaskRabbit and gMission, are getting popular. An important task of spatial crowdsourcing platforms is to allocate spatial tasks to suitable workers. Existing approaches only simply focus on maximizing the number of completed spatial tasks but neglect the influence of supplies and demands from real crowdsourcing market, which leads to different optimal objectives for crowdsourcing task assignments. In this paper, to address the shortcomings of the existing approaches, we first propose a more general spatial crowdsourcing task assignment problem, called Market-driven Optimal Task Assignment (MOTA) problem, consisting of two real scenarios, Excess Demand of Crowd Workers and Insufficient Supply of Spatial Tasks, in daily life. Unfortunately, we prove that the two variants of this problem are NP-Hard. Thus, we design two approximation algorithm to solve this problem. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods through extensive experiments on synthetic datasets.