Curiosity-Driven Energy-Efficient Worker Scheduling in Vehicular Crowdsourcing: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) utilizes the potential of a crowd to accomplish certain location based tasks. Although worker scheduling has been well studied recently, most existing works only focus on the static deployment of workers but ignore their temporal movement continuity. In this paper, we explicitly consider the use of unmanned vehicular workers, e.g., drones and driverless cars, which are more controllable and can be deployed in remote or dangerous areas to carry on long-term and hash tasks as a vehicular crowdsourcing (VC) campaign. We propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for curiosity-driven energy-efficient worker scheduling, called "DRL-CEWS", to achieve an optimal trade-off between maximizing the collected amount of data and coverage fairness, and minimizing the overall energy consumption of workers. Specifically, we first utilize a chief-employee distributed computational architecture to stabilize and facilitate the training process. Then, we propose a spatial curiosity model with a sparse reward mechanism to help derive the optimal policy in large crowdsensing space with unevenly distributed data. Extensive simulation results show that DRL-CEWS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and baselines, and we also visualize the benefits curiosity model brings and show the impact of two hyperparameters.