Long-Term or Temporary? Hybrid Worker Recruitment for Mobile Crowd Sensing and Computing

Mobile crowd sensing and computing (MCSC) enables heterogeneous users (workers) to contribute real-time sensed, generated, and pre-processed data from their mobile devices to the MCSC platform, for intelligent service provisioning. This paper investigates a novel hybrid worker recruitment problem where the MCSC platform employs workers to serve MCSC tasks with diverse quality requirements and budget constraints, while considering uncertainties in workers' participation and their local workloads. We propose a hybrid worker recruitment framework consisting of offline and online trading modes. The former enables the platform to overbook long-term workers (services) to cope with dynamic service supply via signing contracts in advance, which is formulated as 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) with probabilistic constraints related to service quality and budget. Besides, motivated by the existing uncertainties which may render long-term workers fail to meet the service quality requirement of each task, we augment our methodology with an online temporary worker recruitment scheme as a backup Plan B to support seamless service provisioning for MCSC tasks, which also represents a 0-1 ILP problem. To tackle these problems which are proved to be NP-hard, we develop three algorithms, namely, i) exhaustive searching, ii) unique index-based stochastic searching with risk-aware filter constraint, and iii) geometric programming-based successive convex algorithm, which achieve the optimal (with high computational complexity) or sub-optimal (with low complexity) solutions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid worker recruitment mechanism in terms of service quality, time efficiency, etc.