Efficient Task Assignment Research Articles

Reducing Power Consumption and Latency of Autonomous Vehicles With Efficient Task and Path Assignment in the V2X-MEC Based on Nash Equilibrium

Reducing Power Consumption and Latency of Autonomous Vehicles With Efficient Task and Path Assignment in the V2X-MEC Based on Nash Equilibrium

Enhancing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Task Assignment with the Adaptive Sampling-Based Task Rationality Review Algorithm

As the application areas of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) continue to expand, the importance of UAV task allocation becomes increasingly evident. A highly effective and efficient UAV task assignment method can significantly enhance the quality of task completion. However, traditional heuristic algorithms often perform poorly in complex and dynamic environments, and existing auction-based algorithms typically fail to ensure optimal assignment results. Therefore, this paper proposes a more rigorous and comprehensive mathematical model for UAV task assignment. By introducing task path decision variables, we achieve a mathematical description of UAV task paths and propose collaborative action constraints. To balance the benefits and efficiency of task assignment, we introduce a novel method: the Adaptive Sampling-Based Task Rationality Review Algorithm (ASTRRA). In the ASTRRA, to address the issue of high-value tasks being easily overlooked when the sampling probability decreases, we propose an adaptive sampling strategy. This strategy increases the sampling probability of high-value targets, ensuring a balance between computational efficiency and maximizing task value. To handle the coherence issues in UAV task paths, we propose a task review and classification method. This method involves reviewing issues in UAV task paths and conducting classified independent auctions, thereby improving the overall task assignment value. Additionally, to resolve the crossover problems between UAV task paths, we introduce a crossover path exchange strategy, further optimizing the task assignment scheme and enhancing the overall value. Experimental results demonstrate that the ASTRRA exhibits excellent performance across various task scales and dynamic scenarios, showing strong robustness and effectively improving task assignment outcomes.

Black widow optimization algorithm for efficient task assignment in cloud computing

Cloud computing was developed by blending virtualization and grid computing technologies. Its purpose is to provide Internet-based, on-demand, and consumption-based access to pools of computing resources in a measurable, adaptable, and scalable manner. Task scheduling is essential to cloud computing to ensure the performance of cloud services. However, inefficient scheduling can lead to resource issues such as under-allocation and over-allocation, which wastes resources and degrades service performance. Therefore, metaheuristic algorithms are incorporated into task scheduling systems to efficiently and timely distribute complex and diverse incoming tasks to limited resources. This study aims to analyze task priorities and precisely assign them to virtual machines. This is achieved by utilizing the Black Widow Optimization (BWO) algorithm. The primary objectives are to reduce time and energy consumption, improve task success rates, and optimize turnaround efficiency. Ultimately, these improvements aim to enhance the overall trustworthiness of the system.

Swiss Round Selection Algorithm for Multi-Robot Task Scheduling

Efficient and stable control and task assignment optimization in electronic commerce logistics and warehousing systems involving multiple robots executing multiple tasks is highly challenging. Hence, this paper proposes a Swiss round selection algorithm for multi-robot task allocation to address the challenges mentioned. Firstly, based on the shipping process of electronic commerce logistics and warehousing systems, the tasks are divided into packaging and sorting stages, and a grid model for the electronic commerce warehousing system is established. Secondly, by increasing the probabilities of crossover and mutation in the population and adopting a full crossover and full mutation approach, the search scope of the population is expanded. Then, a Swiss round selection mechanism with burst probability is proposed, which ensures the smooth inheritance of high-quality individuals while improving the diversity of the population. Finally, 12 comparative experiments are designed with different numbers of robots and tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that the Swiss round selection algorithm outperforms the genetic algorithm in terms of maximum task completion time and convergence time to reach the optimal value. Thus, the effectiveness of the Swiss round selection algorithm in solving the multi-robot task allocation problem is verified.

CrowdBot: An Open-Environment Robot Management System for On-Campus Services

In contemporary campus environments, the provision of timely and efficient services is increasingly challenging due to limitations in accessibility and the complexity and openness of the environment. Existing service robots, while operational, often struggle with adaptability and dynamic task management, leading to inefficiencies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CrowdBot, a robot management system that enhances service in campus environments. Our system leverages a hierarchical reinforcement learning-based cloud-edge hybrid scheduling framework (REDIS), for efficient online streaming task assignment and dynamic action scheduling. To verify the REDIS framework, we have developed a digital twin simulation platform, which integrates large language models and hot-swapping technology. This facilitates seamless human-robot interaction, efficient task allocation, and cost-effective execution through the reuse of robot equipment. Our comprehensive simulations corroborate the system's remarkable efficacy, demonstrating significant improvements with a 24.46% reduction in task completion times, a 9.37% decrease in travel distances, and up to a 3% savings in power usage. Additionally, the system achieves a 7.95% increase in the number of tasks completed and a 9.49% reduction in response time. Real-world case studies further affirm CrowdBot's capability to adeptly execute tasks and judiciously recycle resources, thereby offering a smart and viable solution for the streamlined management of campus services.

AS-T[formula omitted]BP: An efficient assignment scheme for space TT&C tasks with bidirectional privacy-preserving under blockchain architecture

In recent years, the space Tracking Telemetry and Command (TT&C) network has attracted much attention because it can provide users with secure and convenient information services. However, there are still challenges in achieving efficient task assignments and providing privacy-preserving for both TT&C parties in precise space TT&C services. In this paper, we propose an efficient blockchain-based task assignment scheme (AS-T3BP) in space TT&C network. Specifically, we introduce authorized privacy set intersection to ensure bidirectional privacy security for task requesters and performers and integrate an improved cuckoo filter algorithm to achieve batch assignment for tasks. And AS-T3BP allows the executor to customize the access policies of TT&C information flexibly, and only authorized satellites can access the information and verify the assignment results. For tasks that fail to be assigned, we propose a distributed and credible task reassignment method, which publishes the tasks on the blockchain built by the TT&C base station, thereby ensuring the real-time and accuracy of task assignments. Performance analysis shows that AS-T3BP is effective and can minimize misinform rates and reassignment rates of 23.39% and 8.85%, alleviate the problem of inefficient task assignment, and still maintain system stability.

Towards Efficient and Deposit-Free Blockchain-Based Spatial Crowdsourcing

Spatial crowdsourcing leverages the widespread use of mobile devices to outsource tasks to a crowd of users based on their geographical location. Despite its growing popularity, current crowdsourcing systems often suffer from a lack of transparency, centralization, and other security issues. Blockchain technology has revolutionized this sector with its potential for decentralization, security, and transparency. However, existing blockchain-based crowdsourcing systems often overlook efficient task assignment mechanisms and expose users to potential losses due to the obligatory deposit payments to smart contracts, which might be vulnerable or untrustworthy. This paper proposes EDF-Crowd, an E fficient and D eposit- F ree blockchain-based spatial crowdsoucing framework, to address these challenges. EDF-Crowd introduces an efficient, customizable task assignment mechanism based on smart contracts, operating periodically and batch-wise. We also design a fair compensation mechanism to compensate users for the extra overhead caused by invoking certain smart contracts. More importantly, we propose a series of linkage protocols. By linking users’ back-and-forth actions, EDF-Crowd can regulate user behavior without requiring users to deposit. The versatility of EDF-Crowd also allows its application to generic crowdsourcing systems with minimal modifications. We implement EDF-Crowd based on the EOS blockchain. Extensive evaluations show that EDF-Crowd achieves high task assignment efficiency and low cost.

An Integrated Approach to Precedence-Constrained Multi-Agent Task Assignment and Path Finding for Mobile Robots in Smart Manufacturing

Mobile robots play an important role in smart factories, though efficient task assignment and path planning for these robots still present challenges. In this paper, we propose an integrated task- and path-planning approach with precedence constrains in smart factories to solve the problem of reassigning tasks or replanning paths when they are handled separately. Compared to our previous work, we further improve the Regret-based Search Strategy (RSS) for updating the task insertions, which can increase the operational efficiency of machining centers and reduce the time consumption. Moreover, we conduct rigorous experiments in a simulated smart factory with different scales of robots and tasks. For small-scale problems, we conduct a comprehensive performance analysis of our proposed methods and NBS-ISPS, the state-of-the-art method in this field. For large-scale problems, we examine the feasibility of our proposed approach. The results show that our approach takes little computation time, and it can help reduce the idle time of machining centers and make full use of these manufacturing resources to improve the overall operational efficiency of smart factories.

Energy Efficient and Balanced Task Assignment Strategy for Multi-UAV Patrol Inspection System in Mobile Edge Computing Network

Energy Efficient and Balanced Task Assignment Strategy for Multi-UAV Patrol Inspection System in Mobile Edge Computing Network

A novel dual cloud server privacy-preserving scheme in spatial crowdsourcing

As a service for the public, the issue of location leakage in spatial crowdsourcing has attracted extensive attention from researchers and institutions in recent years. Facing this challenge, several encryption-based schemes have been proposed to protect participants' location information from untrusted cloud servers. However, these schemes mainly target insider threats but ignore the collusion problem between dishonest users and cloud servers. In this paper, we define the problem of Brute-Force Attack under collusion between dishonest users and cloud servers and find that there is no solution that can both guarantee efficient task assignment and address this attack. To fill this gap, we propose a novel dual cloud server privacy-preserving scheme. First, utilizing the GeoHash encoding algorithm, we design a grid-based index tree structure and a task assignment method called Locate-then-Find to achieve faster-than-linear assignment efficiency. Considering that traditional system models fail to address the problem of Brute-Force Attack while ensuring efficiency, we then design a dual cloud server system model, and propose a multi-user Two-Step Location Encryption scheme to protect participants' locations. In our model, both high efficiency and high security are promised. Security analysis demonstrates that our scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model and resistant to the Brute-Force Attack. In the experimental analysis, we first evaluate the resistance of existing grid-based schemes against the Brute-Force Attack, and subsequently demonstrate the performance of our scheme on a real-world dataset. The final comparison experiments show that our scheme exhibits superior performance under the same security conditions.

Efficient Package Delivery Task Assignment for Truck and High Capacity Drone

Efficient Package Delivery Task Assignment for Truck and High Capacity Drone

Probabilistic Coverage Constraint Task Assignment with Privacy Protection in Vehicular Crowdsensing.

The increasing popularity of portable smart devices has led to the emergence of vehicular crowdsensing as a novel approach for real-time sensing and environmental data collection, garnering significant attention across various domains. Within vehicular crowdsensing, task assignment stands as a fundamental research challenge. As the number of vehicle users and perceived tasks grows, the design of efficient task assignment schemes becomes crucial. However, existing research solely focuses on task deadlines, neglecting the importance of task duration. Additionally, the majority of privacy protection mechanisms in the current task assignment process emphasize safeguarding user location information but overlook the protection of user-perceived duration. This lack of protection exposes users to potential time-aware inference attacks, enabling attackers to deduce user schedules and device information. To address these issues in opportunistic task assignment for vehicular crowdsensing, this paper presents the minimum number of participants required under the constraint of probability coverage and proposes the User-Based Task Assignment (UBTA) mechanism, which selects the smallest set of participants to minimize the payment cost while measuring the probability of accomplishing perceived tasks by user combinations. To ensure privacy protection during opportunistic task assignment, a privacy protection method based on differential privacy is introduced. This method fuzzifies the sensing duration of vehicle users and calculates the probability of vehicle users completing sensing tasks, thus avoiding the exposure of users' sensitive data while effectively assigning tasks. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and a comprehensive set of simulation experiments.

Parallel swarm-based algorithms for scheduling independent tasks

Task scheduling is crucial for achieving high performance in parallel computing. Since task scheduling is NP-hard, the efficient assignment of tasks to compute resources remains an issue. Across the literature, several algorithms have been proposed to solve different scheduling problems. One group of promising approaches in this field is formed by swarm-based algorithms which have a potential to benefit from a parallel execution. Common swarm-based algorithms are Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In this article, we propose two new scheduling methods based on parallel ACO, PSO and, Hill Climbing, respectively. These algorithms are used to solve the problem of scheduling independent tasks onto heterogeneous multicore platforms. The results of performance measuements demonstrate the improvements on the makespan and the scheduling time achieved by the parallel variants.

A Dynamic Task Allocation Framework in Mobile Crowd Sensing with D3QN.

With the coverage of sensor-rich smart devices (smartphones, iPads, etc.), combined with the need to collect large amounts of data, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) has gradually attracted the attention of academics in recent years. MCS is a new and promising model for mass perception and computational data collection. The main function is to recruit a large group of participants with mobile devices to perform sensing tasks in a given area. Task assignment is an important research topic in MCS systems, which aims to efficiently assign sensing tasks to recruited workers. Previous studies have focused on greedy or heuristic approaches, whereas the MCS task allocation problem is usually an NP-hard optimisation problem due to various resource and quality constraints, and traditional greedy or heuristic approaches usually suffer from performance loss to some extent. In addition, the platform-centric task allocation model usually considers the interests of the platform and ignores the feelings of other participants, to the detriment of the platform's development. Therefore, in this paper, deep reinforcement learning methods are used to find more efficient task assignment solutions, and a weighted approach is adopted to optimise multiple objectives. Specifically, we use a double deep Q network (D3QN) based on the dueling architecture to solve the task allocation problem. Since the maximum travel distance of the workers, the reward value, and the random arrival and time sensitivity of the sensing tasks are considered, this is a dynamic task allocation problem under multiple constraints. For dynamic problems, traditional heuristics (eg, pso, genetics) are often difficult to solve from a modeling and practical perspective. Reinforcement learning can obtain sub-optimal or optimal solutions in a limited time by means of sequential decision-making. Finally, we compare the proposed D3QN-based solution with the standard baseline solution, and experiments show that it outperforms the baseline solution in terms of platform profit, task completion rate, etc., the utility and attractiveness of the platform are enhanced.

Adaptive-Learning-Based Vehicle-to-Vehicle Opportunistic Resource-Sharing Framework

With an ever-increasing number of connected devices on roads, it becomes unsustainable to provide nearby specialized execution resources (compute and storage) for servicing innovative applications. Moreover, the vehicular environment being inherently ad hoc and opportunistic, not to mention highly mobile, makes it unsuitable to use traditional cloud computing due to delayed and interrupted services. Thus, there is a possibility to introduce potential collaboration among nearby connected vehicles. However, the underlying decision model for the selection of the most suitable vehicle for task offloading is challenging in such a dynamic environment. In this study, we propose a collaborative vehicular computing framework that adopts online learning for efficient task assignment between local and neighboring computing resources. The underlying workload adaptive task offloading intends to balance out the workload across neighboring vehicles. The framework is compared against three techniques including two adaptive learning techniques in terms of service delay, efficiency, task delivery rate, task failures, and learning regret. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed resource-sharing network, improving service quality and throughput for servicing innovative intelligent transportation applications.

Multi-AGV Task Allocation with Attention Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Automated guided vehicle (AGV) is an important transportation equipment, which is widely used in warehouses and factories. In the scenarios of multi-AGVs application, an efficient AGVs task assignment strategy is beneficial for transportation costs, balance of workload and increasing distribution efficiency. The traditional method usually depends on a powerful scheduling system, which solves the task assignment problem in a regular way. In this paper, we present a decentralized framework of multi-task allocation with attention (MTAA) in deep reinforcement learning, which combines with the methods of task assignment in balance and path planning in cooperation for distribution application. As for task assignment balance, we adopt DNN network to achieve task assignment equilibrium. In multi-AGVs path planning, methods of A3C are embedded in MTAA framework, which are instrumental in improving the stationarity and performance in deep reinforcement learning application. In experiments, we designed two different scenarios under different obstacles to verify the performance of MTAA-A3C and MTAA-DQN methods. The experiments show that the proposed approach has feasibility and effectiveness used in multi-AGVs application.

The object-oriented dynamic task assignment for unmanned surface vessels

This paper investigates the task assignment and guidance issues of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) interception. When the USVs formation is invaded by some moving objects during its escort, it is necessary for the unmanned systems to assign defenders to prevent attackers approaching the vulnerable target in antagonistic scenarios. This action requires efficient guidance and task assignment strategies. With this in mind, this paper presents the Integral Proportional Navigation Guidance (IPNG) with Tabu Dynamic Consensus-Based Auction Algorithm (TDCBAA) in marine interception scenario. First, IPNG is introduced in the interception game considering the USV kinematic model, which can effectively reduce the individual interception time. Second, a new bidding function is designed for moving objects interception with the consideration of the attackers’ types, positions and interception time. Finally, a TDCBAA is designed to solve the task assignment subproblem, resulting in a shorter overall interception time and a higher interception success rate. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can optimize the allocation of defenders in real-time and intercept the attackers more quickly compared with other classical algorithms, which is more suitable in situations where attackers are approaching from all directions.

Slow Replica and Shared Protection: Energy-Efficient and Reliable Task Assignment in Cloud Data Centers

With the explosive growth in the scale of cloud computing infrastructures, reliability and energy efficiency have become important concerns considering the great complexity of cloud data centers. There is an urgent need for efficient task assignment that can dispatch tasks to appropriate cloud data center servers, which is critical to achieve reliability and energy efficiency in current cloud data centers. Most of the research on task assignment focuses on only one of the objectives of reliability and energy efficiency, while the two objectives are intrinsically conflicting with each other. In this paper, we deal with the problem of task assignment in data centers, with the objective of minimizing the energy consumption while providing failure tolerance to task execution failure. We propose a reliability-aware and energy-efficient task replica assignment algorithm based on running task replicas at a low speed and enabling multiple task replicas to share the same server resources. Each task in a job processed by the cloud computing platform has two instances: main task and task replica (shadow). Each main task runs on an individual server, and the task replica associated with the main task is assigned on a different server. The main tasks run at the full server speed, while the task replicas run at a lower rate than the main tasks. The task replicas can be mapped onto dedicated backup servers or be assigned to the servers on which the main tasks are running. Multiple task replicas can share the same server resources to reduce the number of servers required. We conduct experiments through simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the energy consumption, while achieving a good balance between the number of servers used and job completion time.

Multi-UAVs task assignment method considering expected destruction probability of target

To solve the combat task assignment of reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicle (RUAV)/unmanned combat aerial vehicle(UCAV), this paper proposed an efficient task assignment method that takes into account the expected destruction probability of target. This method improves the utility function and constraint of the model that based on the goal of destroying the total sum of the target value. The adjustment factor is added to the model to achieve a balanced distribution of RUAVs/UCAVs resources; the expected destruction probability of target is introduced as a constraint to prevent the excessive distribution of RUAVs/UCAVs resources. Subsequently, a greedy algorithm based on maximizing marginal-return is designed to solve the proposed model. The simulation results show that the improved algorithm not only meets the combat effectiveness but also improves the economic performance on the basis of real-time task allocation.

A scheduling-driven approach to efficiently assign bug fixing tasks to developers

The efficient assignment of bug fixing tasks to software developers is of major importance in software maintenance and evolution. When those tasks are not efficiently assigned to developers, the software project might confront extra costs and delays. In this paper, we propose a strategy that minimizes the time and the cost in bug fixing by finding the best feasible developer arrangement to handle bug fixing requests. We enhance therefore a state-of-the-art solution that uses an evolutionary bi-objective algorithm by involving a scheduling-driven approach that explores more parts of the search space. Scheduling is the process of evaluating all possible orders that developers can follow to fix the bugs they have been assigned. Through an empirical study we analyze the performance of the scheduling-driven approach and compare it to state of the art solutions. A non-parametric statistical test with four quality indicator metrics is used to assure its superiority. The experiments using two case-studies (JDT and Platform) showed that the scheduling-driven approach is superior to the state of the art approach in 71% and 74% of cases, respectively. Thus, our approach offers superior performance by assigning more conveniently bug fixing tasks to developers, while still avoiding to overload developers.