Vehicles equipped with abundant sensors offer a promising way for large-scale, low-cost road data collection. To realize this potential, a well-designed vehicle scheduling scheme is essential for deploying the recruited drivers efficiently. Nevertheless, existing works fail to consider the marginal effect among drivers’ collections. Different from them, this paper introduces a new multiple-vehicle scheduling problem, which jointly optimizes task allocation and vehicle trajectory planning to maximize the overall collection utility by accounting for the marginal effect in drivers’ data collections. However, solving this problem is non-trivial due to its involvement with multiple coupled NP-hard problems. To this end, we propose
MeSched
, a
M
arginal
e
ffect-aware multiple-vehicle
Sched
uling scheme designed for road data collection. Specifically, we first present a greedy-based auxiliary graph construction method to disentangle the initial problem into multiple independent single-vehicle scheduling subproblems. Furthermore, we build an approximate surrogate function which transforms each subproblem into a tractable form involving only a single variable. The theoretical analysis proves that
MeSched
can achieve a
\(1-{(1/e)}^{\frac{1}{4}} \)
-approximation ratio in polynomial time. Comprehensive evaluations based on a real-world trajectory dataset of 12,493 vehicles demonstrate that
MeSched
can significantly improve the collection utility by 104.5% on average compared with four baselines.