Multitask Allocation to Heterogeneous Participants in Mobile Crowd Sensing

Task allocation is a key problem in Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS). Prior works have mainly assumed that participants can complete tasks once they arrive at the location of tasks. However, this assumption may lead to poor reliability in sensing data because the heterogeneity among participants is disregarded. In this study, we investigate a multitask allocation problem that considers the heterogeneity of participants (i.e., different participants carry various devices and accomplish different tasks). A greedy discrete particle swarm optimization with genetic algorithm operation is proposed in this study to address the abovementioned problem. This study is aimed at maximizing the number of completed tasks while satisfying certain constraints. Simulations over a real-life mobile dataset verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline methods under different settings.