An experimental evaluation of task assignment in spatial crowdsourcing

Abstract

Recently, with the rapid development of mobile devices and the crowdsourcing platforms, the spatial crowdsourcing has attracted much attention from the database community. Specifically, spatial crowdsourcing refers to sending a location-based request to workers according to their positions, and workers need to physically move to specified locations to conduct tasks. Many works have studied task assignment problems in spatial crowdsourcing, however, their problem settings are different from each other. Thus, it is hard to compare the performances of existing algorithms on task assignment in spatial crowdsourcing. In this paper, we present a comprehensive experimental comparison of most existing algorithms on task assignment in spatial crowdsourcing. Specifically, we first give general definitions about spatial workers and spatial tasks based on definitions in the existing works such that the existing algorithms can be applied on the same synthetic and real data sets. Then, we provide a uniform implementation for all the tested algorithms of task assignment problems in spatial crowdsourcing (open sourced). Finally, based on the results on both synthetic and real data sets, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of tested algorithms, which can guide future research on the same area and practical implementations of spatial crowdsourcing systems.