Unknown Worker Recruitment with Budget and Covering Constraints for Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing, through which a requester can recruit a group of crowd workers via a platform and coordinate them to perform some sensing tasks, has attracted lots of attention recently. However, most of the existing mobile crowdsensing systems assume that the qualities of workers are known in advance. Based on this assumption, they study the task assignment and worker recruitment problems. Unfortunately, the qualities of workers are generally unknown in reality, so the platform must find the tradeoff between exploring and exploiting the qualities by using reinforcement learning. At the same time, all sensing tasks are required to be covered in each round (covering constraint), and the requester usually has a limited budget (budget constraint). In this paper, we study how to recruit unknown workers under the budget and covering constraints so that the total expected achieved qualities can be maximized. To this end, we model the problem as a combination of a maximum weight matching problem and a special multi-armed bandit problem. We first consider that the recruitment costs of workers are homogeneous and propose a recruitment algorithm with a performance guarantee. Then, we study the heterogenous case and devise a heuristic algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate the performances of our algorithms through extensive simulations.