Bi-objective Robust Incentive Mechanism Design for Mobile Crowdsensing

In recent years, mobile crowdsensing has become an effective method for large-scale data collection. Incentive mechanism is fundamentally important for mobile crowdsensing systems. Many mobile crowdsensing systems expect to optimize multiple objectives simultaneously. Most of the existing works transform the multi-objective problem into a single objective problem through constraints or scalarization method. However, due to the uncertain importance (weights) of objectives and the instable quality of crowdsensed data, such transformation is usually unrealizable. In this paper, we aim to optimize the worst performance of two objective functions in mobile crowdsensing in order to improve the system robustness. We model an auction-based bi-objective robust mobile crowdsensing system, and design two independent objective functions to maximize the expected profit and coverage, respectively. We formulate the Robust User Selection (RUS) problem, and design an incentive mechanism, which utilizes the combination of binary search and greedy algorithm, to solve the RUS problem. Through both rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the designed incentive mechanisms satisfy desirable properties of computational efficiency, individual rationality, truthfulness, and constant approximation to the tightened RUS problem. Moreover, the proposed incentive mechanism can be easily extended to multi-objective robust mobile crowdsensing systems, and all desirable properties still hold. The simulation results reveal that our incentive mechanism achieves 11% improvement of the platform’s utility, compared with the greedy algorithm for bi-objective mobile crowdsensing systems on average.