Rational coordination of crowdsourced resources for geo-temporal request satisfaction

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 presume that mobile agents participating in GeoPresence-capable applications should be rational, competitive, and willing to deviate from their routes if given the right incentive. In this paper, we define the Hitchhiking problem, which is that of finding the optimal assignment of requests 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 satisfaction, with an objective to maximize the total profit of the system. We analytically prove the mechanism to be convergent with a profit comparable to that of a 1/2-approximation greedy algorithm, and evaluate its consideration of rationality experimentally.