Revisiting Path Planning Problem Towards Participant Executing Time Optimization in Mobile Crowd Sensing

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is a popular sensing paradigm that recruits participants carrying sensing devices to collect data for specific tasks in a sensing area. In an MCS system, when a participant executes limited multiple location-based tasks according to different task accessing sequences, its executing time which depends on its travelling path is different. Therefore, how to perform an efficient path planning to find the optimal executing time for each participant is of vital importance. In this paper, we revisit the path planning problem in MCS and propose a novel path planning method based on the beetle swarm optimization (BSO) algorithm. First, a participant executing time is defined as the sum of the moving time along its travelling path and the sensing time for executing all tasks on this path. Then, to minimize it, an improved BSO algorithm is utilized to find the optimal path for each participant. In particular, a largest-order-value (LOV) rule is introduced to convert each position of beetles from a multi-dimensional vector into a travelling path for the participant. The simulation results verify that the proposed method is superior to other baselines in terms of the participant executing time and shows a faster convergence speed.