A hybrid tabu search algorithm for Task Allocation in Mobile Crowd-sensing

One of the key features of a mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) system is task allocation, which aims to recruit workers efficiently to carry out the tasks. Due to various constraints of the tasks (such as specific sensor requirement and a probabilistic guarantee of task completion) and workers heterogeneity, the task allocation become challenging. This assignment problem becomes more intractable because of the deadline of the tasks and a lot of possible task completion order or moving path of workers since a worker may perform multiple tasks and need to physically visit the tasks venues to complete the tasks. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid search algorithm for task allocation called HST is proposed to address the problem, which employ a traveling salesman problem heuristic to find the task completion order. HST is developed based on the tabu search algorithm and exploits the premature convergence avoiding concepts from the genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. The experimental results verify that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing methods while satisfying given constraints.