Mechanism design for coordinating vehicle-based mobile sensing tasks within the ride-hailing platform

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel auction-based mechanism to coordinate vehicle-based mobile sensing tasks within ride-hailing platforms, balancing sensing objectives with ride-hailing services and incentivizing driver participation.

Contribution

It introduces a staggered operation strategy and a refined auction mechanism with budget constraints to efficiently integrate sensing tasks into ride-hailing systems.

Findings

High sensing task completion rates achieved

Low social costs maintained

Drivers can earn more by participating in sensing tasks

Abstract

This paper evaluates the benefit of integrating vehicle-based mobile crowd-sensing tasks into the ride-hailing system through the collaboration between the data user and the ride-hailing platform. In such a system, the ride-hailing platform commissions high-valued sensing tasks to idle drivers who can undertake either ride-hailing or sensing requests. Considering the different service requirements and time windows between sensing and ride-hailing requests, we design a staggered operation strategy for ride-hailing order matching and the sensing task assignment. The auction-based mechanisms are employed to minimize costs while incentivizing driver participation in mobile sensing. To address the budget deficit problem of the primal VCG-based task assignment mechanism, we refine the driver selection approach and tailor the payment rule by imposing additional budget constraints. We demonstrate the benefits of our proposed mechanism through a series of numerical experiments using the NYC Taxi data. Experimental results reveal the potential of the mechanism for achieving high completion rates of sensing tasks at low social costs without degrading ride-hailing services. Furthermore, drivers who participate in both mobile sensing tasks and ride-hailing requests may gain higher income, but this advantage may diminish with an increasing number of such drivers and higher demand for ride-hailing services.