Online context-aware task assignment in mobile crowdsourcing via adaptive discretization

Abstract

Mobile crowdsourcing is rapidly boosting the Internet of Things revolution. Its natural development leads to an adaptation to various real-world scenarios, thus imposing a need for wide generality on data-processing and task-assigning methods. We consider the task assignment problem in mobile crowdsourcing while taking into consideration the following: (i) we assume that additional information is available for both tasks and workers, such as location, device parameters, or task parameters, and make use of such information; (ii) as an important consequence of the worker-location factor, we assume that some workers may not be available for selection at given times; (iii) the workers' characteristics may change over time. To solve the task assignment problem in this setting, we propose Adaptive Optimistic Matching for Mobile Crowdsourcing (AOM-MC), an online learning algorithm that incurs O~(T(D¯+1)/(D¯+2)+ϵ) regret in T rounds, for any ϵ>0 , under mild continuity assumptions. Here, D¯ is a notion of dimensionality which captures the structure of the problem. We also present extensive simulations that illustrate the advantage of adaptive discretization when compared with uniform discretization, and a time- and location-dependent crowdsourcing simulation using a real-world dataset, clearly demonstrating our algorithm's superiority to the current state-of-the-art and baseline algorithms.