Unknown Task Selection and Worker Recruitment Using Two-Stage Multiarmed Bandit in Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) faces significant challenges in selecting tasks with expected high revenue and recruiting workers with expected high qualities to maximize overall utility. Existing approaches often assume the revenue of posting tasks or the quality of workers is determined, which limits their practical applicability. This article tackles these challenges by modeling the long-term multitask, multiworker selection problem as a two-stage multiarmed bandit (TS-MAB) problem under uncertainty. In each round, the MCS platform selects a long-term task from a pool and recruits the necessary workers, determining payments accordingly. We model the task selection phase as a MAB problem, and the worker recruitment phase, influenced by the task selection, as a combinatorial MAB (CMAB) problem. We propose an extended upper confidence bound (UCB)-based strategy and develop an incentive mechanism based on Auction theory, combined with TS-MAB (i.e., ATS-MAB), for unknown task selection and worker recruitment. Our mechanism theoretically guarantees truthfulness and individual rationality, with a theoretical analysis of its regret bounds. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive incentive mechanism called AATS-MAB, which improves worker recruitment and quality updates, achieving higher total sensing quality and lower regret. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methods.