Two-Stage Online Task Assignment in Mobile Crowdsensing

The development of modern communication technologies and smart mobile devices has driven the evolution of mobile crowdsensing (MCS). Optimizing the task assignment process under constrained resources to maximize utility is a key challenge in MCS. However, most existing studies presuppose a sufficient pool of available workers during the task assignment process, overlooking the impact of temporal fluctuations in worker numbers under online scenarios. Additionally, existing studies commonly publish sensing tasks to the MCS platform for immediate assignment upon their arrival. However, the uncertainty in the number of available workers in online scenarios may fail to meet task demands. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a two-stage online task assignment scheme. The first stage introduces an adaptive task pre-assignment strategy based on worker quantity prediction, which determines task acceptance and assigns tasks to suitable subareas. The second stage employs a dynamic online recruitment method to select workers for the assigned tasks, aiming to maximize platform utility. Finally, the simulation experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods effectively solve the challenges of online task assignment in MCS.