ABSTRACT The crowdsourcing platform serves as an intermediary managing the interaction between a requester who posts a decomposable task and a pool of workers who bid to solve it. Each worker intending to take up the task (partially or fully) decomposes it into multiple independent subtasks and submits it to the platform. Selection of a diverse set of workers (based on the bids received) to solve the decomposable task is challenging as it requires balancing factors like cost and quality while encouraging collaboration. We propose a Worker Set Computation (WSC) methodology to address these challenges by selecting a custom set of potential workers who can collaboratively complete the task with the optimal cost, in an efficient way. The aging technique is employed to dynamically update the weight of each worker, giving more weightage to the feedback received in the recent past. This, in turn, not only favors those workers who were rated well in the immediate past but also ensures that one odd feedback does not influence the overall rating heavily. We compare the performance of the proposed method against the state‐of‐the‐art methods, considering the computational (and budget) requirements, as well as the aging‐based worker rating.

Blockchain Technology (BT) is a futuristic data management technology that eliminates the intermediary/ third-party/central authority as it is operated over a peer-to-peer network running cryptographic protocols. It is tamper-proof as it utilizes a cryptographic hash feature. Some other features, it offers, are transparency, security, inalterability, immutability, and decentralization; these features of the BTs have acquired the wide attention of the computing research community. While a transaction is occurring between two parties, it ensures that the trust is a consensus-driven built-in technology component instead of relying on a third party for the same. With the help of a consensus algorithm, the newly generated block is appended at the end of the already existing chain. In this paper, a thorough analysis of the various blockchain consensus algorithms is conducted including their benefits and drawbacks. Finally, it enlists the challenges and opportunities in designing blockchain consensus algorithms. Further, it proposes an idea for designing a blockchain consensus algorithm and concludes the discussion.

The Two Phase Locking with High Priority (2PL-HP) concurrency control protocol addresses the transaction scheduling issue in a distributed real-time database system (DRTDBS). Although the 2PL-HP protocol is free from priority inversion, it may suffer from the problems such as deadlock, cyclic restart, and starvation of lengthy transactions. In this paper, a Controlled Avoidance of deadlock and starvation causing Resourceful Conflict resolution between Transactions (CART) concurrency control protocol has been proposed to minimize the transactions miss percentage by reducing the wastage of system resources through avoiding the deadlock due to controlled locking and starvation to some extent by ensuring a fairness in the allocation of resources for their completion. DRTDBS is simulated and CART outperforms as compared with previous other protocols.