Online Multi-Skilled Task Assignment on Road Networks

Abstract

With the development of smart phones and online to offline, spatial platforms, such as TaskRabbit, are getting famous and popular. Tasks on these platforms have three main characters: they are in real-time dynamic scenario, they are on the road networks, and some of them have multiple skills. However, existing studies do not take into account all these three things simultaneously. Therefore, an important issue of spatial crowdsourcing platforms is to assign workers to tasks according to their skills on road networks in a real-time scenario. In this paper, we first propose a practical problem, called online multi-skilled task assignment on road networks (OMTARN) problem, and prove that the OMTARN problem is NP-Hard and no online algorithms can achieve a constant competitive ratio on this problem. Then, we design a framework using batch-based algorithms, including fixed and dynamic batch-based algorithm, and we show that how the algorithms update the batch. After that, we use the hierarchically separated tree structure to accelerate our algorithms. Finally, we implement all the algorithms of the OMTARN problem and clarify their strengths and weaknesses by testing them on both synthetic and real datasets.