Task Allocation for Mobile Crowdsensing with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a new and promising paradigm of data collection in large-scale sensing and computing. A large group of users with mobile devices are recruited in a specific area to accomplish sensing tasks. An essential aspect of an MCS application is task allocation, which aims to efficiently assign sensing tasks to the recruited workers. Due to various resource and quality constraints, the MCS task allocation problem is often an NP-hard optimization problem. Traditional greedy or heuristic approaches are usually subject to performance loss in a certain degree so as to maintain tractability or accommodate special requirements such as incentive constraints. In this paper, we attempt to employ a deep reinforcement learning method to search for a more efficient task allocation solution. Specifically, we use a double deep Q-network (DDQN) to solve the task allocation problem as a path-planning problem with time windows. Our formulated problem takes into account location-dependency and time-sensitivity of sensing tasks, as well as the resource limits of workers in terms of maximum travelling distances. Simulations are conducted to compare the DDQN-based solution with two standard baseline solutions. The results show that our proposed solution outperforms the baseline solutions in terms of the platform's profit and the coverage of tasks.