Prediction-Based Task Assignment on Spatial Crowdsourcing.
Peng Cheng, Xiang Lian, Lei Chen, Cyrus Shahabi · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2015
With the rapid development of mobile devices, the spatial crowdsourcing has recently attracted much attention from the database community. Specifically, the spatial crowdsourcing refers to a system that automatically assigns a number of location-based workers with spatial tasks nearby . Previous works on the spatial crowdsourcing usually designed task assignment strategies that maximize some assignment scores. However, their assignment strategies only considered the existing workers and tasks in the spatial crowdsourcing system, which might achieve local optimality, due to the unavailability of future workers/tasks that may join the system. Thus, in this paper, our goal is to achieve globally optimal task assignments at the current timestamp, by taking into account not only the existing, but also those future workers/tasks. We formalize an important problem, namely prediction-based spatial crowdsourcing (PB-SC), which finds a global optimal strategy for worker-and-task assignments for multiple rounds, based on both existing and predicted task/worker locations, such that the total assignment quality score of multiple rounds is maximized, under the constraint of the travel budget. The PB-SC problem is very challenging, in terms of the prediction accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we design an effective prediction method to estimate spatial distributions of workers and tasks in the future, and then utilize the predicted ones in our procedure of worker-and-task assignments. We prove that, the PB-SC problem is NP-hard, and thus intractable. Therefore, we propose efficient approximation algorithms, greedy and divide-and-conquer, to deal with the PB-SC problem, by considering both current and future task/worker distributions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our PB-SC processing approaches on real/synthetic data.