Task selection in spatial crowdsourcing from worker’s perspective

Abstract

With the progress of mobile devices and wireless broadband, a new eMarket platform, termed spatial crowdsourcing is emerging, which enables workers (aka crowd) to perform a set of spatial tasks (i.e., tasks related to a geographical location and time) posted by a requester. In this paper, we study a version of the spatial crowdsourcing problem in which the workers autonomously select their tasks, called the worker selected tasks (WST) mode. Towards this end, given a worker, and a set of tasks each of which is associated with a location and an expiration time, we aim to find a schedule for the worker that maximizes the number of performed tasks. We first prove that this problem is NP-hard. Subsequently, for small number of tasks, we propose two exact algorithms based on dynamic programming and branch-and-bound strategies. Since the exact algorithms cannot scale for large number of tasks and/or limited amount of resources on mobile platforms, we propose different approximation algorithms. Finally, to strike a compromise between efficiency and accuracy, we present a progressive algorithms. We conducted a thorough experimental evaluation with both real-world and synthetic data on desktop and mobile platforms to compare the performance and accuracy of our proposed approaches.