Oriented Online Route Recommendation for Spatial Crowdsourcing Task Workers

Emerging spatial crowdsourcing platforms enable the workers (i.e., crowd) to complete spatial crowdsourcing tasks (like taking photos, conducting citizen journalism) that are associated with rewards and tagged with both time and location features. In this paper, we study the problem of online recommending an optimal route for a crowdsourcing worker, such that he can (i) reach his destination on time and (ii) receive the maximum reward from tasks along the route. We show that no optimal online algorithm exists in this problem. Therefore, we propose several heuristics, and powerful pruning rules to speed up our methods. Experimental results on real datasets show that our proposed heuristics are very efficient, and return routes that contain 82–91 % of the optimal reward.