Marginal Effect-aware Multiple-Vehicle Scheduling for Road Data Collection: A Near-optimal Result

Vehicles equipped with abundant sensors offer a promising way for large-scale, low-cost road data collection. To realize this potential, a well-designed vehicle scheduling scheme is essential for deploying the recruited drivers efficiently. Nevertheless, existing works fail to consider the marginal effect among drivers’ collections. Different from them, this article introduces a, to the best of our knowledge, new multiple-vehicle scheduling problem that jointly optimizes task allocation and vehicle trajectory planning to maximize the overall collection utility by accounting for the marginal effect in drivers’ data collections. However, solving this problem is non-trivial due to its involvement with multiple coupled NP-hard problems. To this end, we propose MeSched, a marginal effect-aware multiple-vehicle scheduling scheme designed for road data collection. Specifically, we first present a greedy-based auxiliary graph construction method to disentangle the initial problem into multiple independent single-vehicle scheduling subproblems. Furthermore, we build an approximate surrogate function that transforms each subproblem into a tractable form involving only a single variable. The theoretical analysis proves that MeSched can achieve a 1-(1/ e ) ¼ -approximation ratio in polynomial time. Comprehensive evaluations based on a real-world trajectory dataset of 12,493 vehicles demonstrate that MeSched can significantly improve the collection utility by 104.5% on average compared with four baselines.