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Joint task assignment and path planning for truck and drones in mobile crowdsensing

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Abstract

Utilization of drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles) can largely improve the performance of mobile crowdsensing (MCS) such that the drones can serve as mobile participants for task executions and therefore increase the service range. In this paper, we introduce a truck-drones MCS model by jointly considering the use of truck and drones for task executions. In this model, drones are scheduled to launch from the truck, perform one or more tasks, and rendezvous with the truck for battery swap while the truck can simultaneously serve as a mobile hub and also a mobile task executor. The design objective is to minimize the total cost for the truck and drones’ movement, as well as the driver’s payment in the MCS process. This problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem. We further propose an efficient algorithm based on variable neighborhood search to achieve efficient joint task assignment and path planning. Numerical results show the high efficacy of the proposed algorithm and also the benefit of joint use of truck and drones for mobile crowdsensing.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61872331, 61531006, 61471339, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada (Discovery Grant RGPIN-2018-03792), and the InnovateNL SensorTECH Grant 5404-2061-101. An early version of this paper has been presented at IEEE GLOBECOM 2021.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center of Ubiquitous Sensor Networks, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Zijia Wang & Baoxian Zhang

  2. Information and Communication Department, Army Academy of Armored Forces, Beijing, 100072, China

    Yangxia Xiang

  3. Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL, A1B 3X5, Canada

    Cheng Li

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  1. Zijia Wang
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  2. Baoxian Zhang
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  3. Yangxia Xiang
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  4. Cheng Li
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Correspondence to Baoxian Zhang.

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Wang, Z., Zhang, B., Xiang, Y. et al. Joint task assignment and path planning for truck and drones in mobile crowdsensing. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 16, 1668–1679 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-022-01389-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-022-01389-2

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