Profit-Oriented Task Allocation for Mobile Crowdsensing With Worker Dynamics: Cooperative Offline Solution and Predictive Online Solution

Abstract

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a new paradigm of data collection with large-scale sensing. A group of mobile users are recruited as workers to move around in a specific region and carry out sensing tasks. A challenging problem of MCS is task allocation, especially when the MCS platform needs to assign tasks to selected workers among a large user pool and consider mixed spatial and temporal features, including locations and time windows of tasks, and trajectories and arrival time of workers. In this paper, we take into account these features and study the task allocation problem that assigns tasks to workers over time and guarantees the tasks are accomplished before their deadlines. We consider an offline scenario where the MCS platform is informed of all the information of tasks and workers in advance, and an online scenario where the platform does not know the information of workers before they enter the system. For the offline scenario, we provide a cooperative ant colony algorithm with swarm intelligence to approximate the optimal solution in large-scale cases. For the online scenario with incomplete information, we propose several online algorithms, among which the predictive online algorithm exploits historical records of workers and performs the best. Finally, we conduct simulations and evaluate the differences among the online solutions and offline solutions. The results show that the proposed online solutions can approach the offline optimal solution in small-scale cases, and its approximation obtained by the cooperative offline solution in large-scale cases.