TASC-MADM: Task Assignment in Spatial Crowdsourcing Based on Multiattribute Decision-Making

Abstract

The methodology, formulating a reasonable task assignment to find the most suitable workers for a task and achieving the desired objectives, is the most fundamental challenge in spatial crowdsourcing. Many task assignment approaches have been proposed to improve the quality of crowdsourcing results and the number of task assignment and to limit the budget and the travel cost. However, these approaches have two shortcomings: (1) these approaches are commonly based on the attributes influencing the result of task assignment. However, different tasks may have different preferences for individual attributes; (2) the performance and efficiency of these approaches are expected to be improved further. To address the above issues, we proposed a task assignment approach in spatial crowdsourcing based on multiattribute decision-making (TASC-MADM), with the dual objectives of improving the performance as well as the efficiency. Specifically, the proposed approach jointly considers the attributes on the quality of the worker and the distance between the worker and the task, as well as the influence differences caused by the task’s attribute preference. Furthermore, it can be extended flexibly to scenarios with more attributes. We tested the proposed approach in a real-world dataset and a synthetic dataset. The proposed TASC-MADM approach was compared with the RB-TPSC and the Budget-TASC algorithm using the real dataset and the synthetic dataset; the TASC-MADM approach yields better performance than the other two algorithms in the task assignment rate and the CPU cost.