Rational coordination of crowdsourced resources for geo-temporal request satisfaction
Date
2015-03-23
DOI
Authors
Bassem, Christine
Bestavros, Azer
Version
OA Version
Citation
Bassem, Christine; Bestavros, Azer. Rational Coordination of Crowdsourced Resources for Geo-temporal Request Satisfaction. Technical Report BU-CS-TR 2015-002, Computer Science Department, Boston University, March 23, 2015.
Abstract
Existing mobile devices roaming around the mobility field should be considered as useful resources in geo-temporal request satisfaction. We refer to the capability of an application to access a physical device at particular geographical locations and times as GeoPresence, and we pre- sume that mobile agents participating in GeoPresence-capable applica- tions should be rational, competitive, and willing to deviate from their routes if given the right incentive. In this paper, we define the Hitch- hiking problem, which is that of finding the optimal assignment of re- quests with specific spatio-temporal characteristics to competitive mobile agents subject to spatio-temporal constraints. We design a mechanism that takes into consideration the rationality of the agents for request sat- isfaction, with an objective to maximize the total profit of the system. We analytically prove the mechanism to be convergent with a profit com- parable to that of a 1/2-approximation greedy algorithm, and evaluate its consideration of rationality experimentally.