Task Selection and Scheduling for Food Delivery: A Game-Theoretic Approach
Mingzhe Li, Jin Zhang, Wei Wang · 2018
With the development of embedded sensors in smartphones and the ever-growing number of mobile users, more and more spatial crowdsourcing applications come into our daily lives. Food delivery, a specific application of spatial crowdsourcing, emerged and quickly proliferates in recent years. However, task selection and scheduling remains a challenging problem in food delivery. In this paper, we aim to address the task selection and scheduling problem from a game-theoretic perspective. Specifically, the riders are allowed to select a set of tasks as well as the task completion order, by taking account of their locations, speed, traveling costs and capacities. The objective of each rider is to maximize his own utility. We formulate a food delivery game and prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms existing solutions in terms of the social welfare, average utility, task completion ratio, and fairness. Moreover, the social welfare attained by our scheme comes close to that of the centralized optimal solution.