Multi-space crowd sensing has emerged as a promising paradigm for 3D urban perception. However, it faces critical challenges including space coupling, task heterogeneity, and dynamic resource availability. To address these issues, the Multi-Space Fairness Task Allocation (MSFTA) problem is formulated, aiming to maximize task completion while ensuring fairness across spatial dimensions. The problem is proven to be NP-hard, and a dynamic collaborative optimization framework is proposed. Within this framework, a Multi-Space Clustering QuadTree Voronoi Partition (MCQVP) is developed for fine-grained multi-dimensional partitioning by leveraging DBSCAN and quadtree structures. In addition, a Group Urgency-Based Multi-Shortest Path (GUBMSP) scheduler is incorporated to prioritize time-sensitive task groups via urgency-aware critical paths. Furthermore, a Fairness-Aware Pareto Multi-Objective Ant-Q Learning (FA-PMOAQL) allocator is introduced to integrate Q-learning and ant-colony optimization under fairness-aware multi-objective guidance. These designs establish a unified framework that not only improves task allocation efficiency through multi-space partitioning and urgency-driven scheduling, but also ensures equitable resource utilization by embedding fairness into the learning process. Comparison experiments on Tokyo and New York datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves up to 12.8% higher task completion rate compared with baseline algorithms, while maintaining relatively low runtime. In cross-layer scenarios, the completion rate improves by 20% when agent resources increase, and under heavy task loads it sustains competitive performance with only moderate decline.

With the explosive growth of mobile data, Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) has become a popular paradigm for large-scale data collection. The difficulty of data collection and the gaps in workers’ sensing capabilities are key factors to consider in worker recruitment and task assignment. To address these issues, we designed a two-stage cooperative incentive mechanism. In the first stage, a shelving level is introduced to assess task difficulty. Tasks are divided into high-quality and low-quality groups based on quality scores, while workers are categorized into high-ability and low-ability groups based on their historical performance. The Improved Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization (ICPSO) algorithm is then applied to generate optimal task combinations. In the second stage, we address benefit distribution among cooperating workers by introducing time-dependent rewards and employing Stackelberg game theory to analyze the optimal completion time for both high-ability and low-ability workers. This analysis determines the optimal reward distribution and ability value allocation, with proof of the existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium. Comparative experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our cooperative task mechanism outperforms existing task bundling methods, validating its rationality and effectiveness.

With the popularity of smart mobile devices embedded with rich sensors, mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has gradually attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. Task allocation is a key research problem in MCS systems, where platforms recruit workers and assign them crowd tasks. While previous research has focused on the utility of recruiting workers, the location factor of workers has been ignored. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-stage worker recruitment framework named BW-Selector, which recruits workers in two stages. In the offline stage, this paper proposes an opportunity-crowd worker recruitment algorithm, which first divides the task area with a Voronoi diagram, and then builds a prediction model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) to predict the movement trajectory of workers and solve the cold start in the traditional MCS system. In the online stage, for maximizing the task space coverage under the premise of a limited task budget, this paper proposes a participatory-crowd worker recruitment algorithm based on adaptive threshold selection. Finally, through experiments on real datasets, it is verified that BW-Selector has better performance in terms of task space coverage and running time under the same constraints compared with other methods.

Unmanned agents represent a significant advancement in unmanned control and constitute an important element in the future agent warfare. Their autonomous decision-making capabilities are integral to accomplishing tasks independently. To address challenges inherent in multiparty game scenarios that traditional method struggle with and enhance the applicability and accuracy of game decision-making, this article proposes a novel multiagent confrontation method for unmanned vessels, tailored to a three-party dynamic multistrategy evolutionary game in incomplete information scenarios. The approach introduces a new incentive mechanism designed to enhance both individual and collective profits of agents. Using evolutionary game theory, a three-party model is developed, incorporating interactions among player, enemy, and neutral agents. The model tracks the evolution of strategies to identify stable equilibria across various perceptual conditions. Simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in selecting optimal strategies for unmanned vessels in complex battlefield scenarios, demonstrating its potential for improving autonomous decision-making in multiparty confrontations.

With the widespread use of mobile networks and smart devices, opportunistic mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has emerged as one of the most promising sensing paradigms for intelligent data. In Opportunistic MCS, the real-time mobility of participants and requesters is a crucial feature, as it significantly impacts the quality of MCS services. However, most existing task allocation approaches focus on optimizing the overall system performance while disregarding the mobile attribute of participants and requesters. To remedy this issue, this article proposes a real-time route prediction-based multiobjective task allocation for Opportunistic MCS, called RRP-MOTA, which presents the participants’ route-considered task allocation scheme to maximize social welfare comprehensively. Specifically, instead of merely optimizing system performance, a two-stage mechanism is designed to comprehensively enhance task allocation efficiency by estimating and leveraging participants’ routes. Moreover, by utilizing participants’ spatio–temporal location information, an improved graph convolutional network-based participant route prediction method is developed to provide more accurate participant location information for task allocation. Furthermore, a reference vector-based multiobjective task allocation method is suggested to cater to diverse usage preferences by balancing quality of service and task cost. To validate the performance of our proposed method, extensive simulations are performed on synthetic and real datasets in two scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RRP-MOTA significantly outperforms the chosen existing designs.

With the rise of sensor-equipped mobile devices, Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) has emerged as an efficient method for information gathering. In smart city environmental sensing, workers can acquire data by merely being within the sensing area. Currently, most studies select opportunistic workers based on the workers’ prior preferences and ignore the effect of movement trajectories on potential opportunistic workers. This may result in the selected opportunistic workers being less-than-ideal, or even ignoring the failure of some tasks to be accomplished, thus resulting in a waste of resources. Therefore, this paper proposes a Recruitment Framework for judging Opportunistic Workers based on Movement Trajectories (RFOW-MT), a two-phase framework for worker recruitment. In the offline phase, combining the neural network model Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Geohash algorithm, an algorithm to detect the set of candidate opportunistic workers is proposed, solving the problems of location privacy and search efficiency. In the online phase, in order to maximize the task spatial coverage under the task budget constraint, a task allocation algorithm based on geographic location packed grouping is proposed. Finally, RFOW-MT outperforms other methods in terms of task spatial coverage and runtime as verified by experiments on real datasets.

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) is a widely adopted approach for data collection across diverse applications. However, as the number of tasks and participants in MCS continues to grow, task allocation and dynamic pricing challenges have become increasingly complex. Existing research primarily focuses on single-task allocation problems, often overlooking the diversity and complexity inherent in multi-task, multi-worker scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Enhanced Heuristic Search with Tabu and Local Search (EH-STLS) algorithm, alongside a Kolmogorov-Arnold Deep Q Network (KDQN) model, both grounded in a Stackelberg game framework. The EH-STLS algorithm employs a multi-objective optimization framework that combines tabu search and local search strategies to improve the efficiency of worker-task matching while ensuring high task quality. The KDQN model views task publishers as leaders and treats crowdsourcing platforms, encryption agencies, and workers as followers to achieve optimal dynamic pricing and utility allocation. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets generated from real-world data reveal that the proposed methods substantially outperforms the baseline algorithms regarding task allocation quality and pricing efficiency, achieving up to a 21.7% increase in task quality and a 16.4% improvement in pricing effectiveness.

Mobile crowdsourcing is rapidly growing with Artificial Intelligent of Things. At the same time, the type and complexity of the tasks requested by the requester change and diversify. Therefore, how to design allocation algorithms for the situation of increasing task complexity is particularly critical. In this paper, to cope with this problem, the idea of worker coalition collaboration and reputation evaluation mechanisms are introduced into it. A two-stage allocation based on same-region and cross-region is performed in the divided regional grid. In the first stage, multi-worker and multi-task allocation is realized by combining the reverse auction theory based on the workers’ historical reputation value, which motivates the workers with high reputation value to choose their tasks and contribute data with high sensed quality. The second stage utilizes genetic algorithms to select a coalition of workers for cross-region sensed execution for tasks that do not meet sensed quality requirements. This process will provide additional payoff incentives to compensate for travel costs within the worker coalition, increasing the number of tasks completed and maximizing social welfare. Finally, multiple comparison experiments on the real dataset Yelp are conducted for validation.

The evolution of 5G and 6G technologies has boosted mobile network speed, reduced delays, and widened coverage, empowering Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) to overcome surface and terrain obstacles. However, this advancement brings new hurdles for online task assignment. While most MCS methods suit surface applications, they struggle with allocation in complex environments. This paper focuses on MCS in varied settings like surface, air, and high altitude. Currently, planning-based task assignment works better for one-to-one or one-to-many scenarios, with limited options for many-to-many situations. Improving platform utility, attracting top-quality crowd workers, and enhancing task completion efficiency are vital. To tackle these challenges, the paper introduces a spatial division algorithm using 3D Voronoi diagrams for complex environments. This algorithm utilizes task coordinates to delineate assignment spaces. Additionally, it introduces a two-stage many-to-many online task assignment algorithm (MOTA) that forecasts crowd workers’ arrival probabilities and combines auction-based incentives with differential evolution algorithms. MOTA ensures efficient matching of workers and tasks within spatio-temporal constraints, balancing both parties’ interests. Finally, comparative experiments on real datasets assess the proposed MOTA algorithm’s usability and effectiveness based on overall gain, running time, task count, and assignment rate.

With the rapid development of crowd sensing computing, Mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) has become an indispensable part of today’s society. While MCS brings convenience to people, it also exposes them to the risk of privacy leakage. In addition, the demand for data is increasing, and the personalized privacy requirements of crowd workers may affect the service quality. In order to address these problems, this paper proposes a personalized privacy protection incentive mechanism (PPPIM) for MCS based on homomorphic encryption and edge computing. Firstly, this paper designs a personalized privacy metric, using social attributes and private attributes of crowd workers to calculate the privacy level required by crowd workers. Then, based on homomorphic encryption and edge computing, a personalized residual federated security learning scheme (PRFSL) is proposed to ensure the security, timeliness, integrity of task data and the privacy of crowd workers’ needs to improve encryption efficiency. Finally, based on the evolutionary game, a personalized privacy incentive mechanism is proposed to improve the overall service utility. Experimental comparisons based on real datasets show that the proposed scheme can not only ensure the security, timeliness, and integrity of task data more effectively. It can also effectively reduce data processing time, improve the probability of crowd workers actively completing tasks and the overall service quality utility.

In Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS), the task information released by task publishers and the sensed data submitted by workers may expose their privacy, while the rapid growth of MCS imposes increasing data processing pressure on cloud platforms and mobile devices. To address these challenges, a bilateral privacy protection scheme based on adaptive location generalization and grouping aggregation is presented in this paper. The scheme uses federated learning as a framework and utilizes edge computing to reduce the data processing burden on cloud platforms and mobile devices. This paper proposes the adaptive location generalization algorithm (KM-ALG) and a real task location release mechanism based on the RSA algorithm to protect the task location privacy of the task publisher. For workers’ privacy protection, the lightweight multiple perturbation algorithm based on localized differential privacy (LDP-MP) proposed in this paper is used to protect workers’ data privacy. Aiming at the problem of data quality loss caused by perturbation, a perturbation elimination mechanism based on homomorphic encryption technology is proposed. In order to prevent workers’ sensed data from leaking location information, a grouping aggregation mechanism is used to destroy the correspondence between workers and submitted data, thereby protecting workers’ location privacy. In addition, a task allocation scheme adapted to task location privacy protection is also proposed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified through experiments on multiple real data sets.

With the rapid progression of mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) technology, its growing influence in our daily lives has established it as a crucial component of modern society. However, while the convenience of MCS is widely appreciated, it also poses significant threats to personal privacy, particularly location privacy. This article introduces a novel system for personalized location privacy protection in MCS. The system is divided into three main parts. The first part presents an innovative algorithm that calculates the location privacy level of crowd workers. This algorithm is crucial in determining the location privacy level required by each individual crowd worker. The second part involves the design of a personalized differential privacy protection (P-DP) algorithm, which is based on the exponential mechanism. This algorithm provides varying degrees of privacy protection strength, tailored to the location privacy protection level of each crowd worker. Furthermore, we incorporate a trusted third party (TP) server to act as an intermediary. This server eliminates any correlation between the crowd workers and the data. It is also tasked with calculating the location privacy level and reward for each crowd worker. The third part of the system is the personalized localized differential privacy (LDP) protection (P- LDP) algorithm, this algorithm is designed to further solve the problem of privacy disclosure caused by the TP server being attacked. Finally, we have conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed location privacy protection system using real data sets, and the results demonstrate that the system can effectively balance the location privacy protection of crowd workers and the availability of location data, thereby improving the efficiency and reliability of MCS.

With the development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), the work of large-scale data collection makes spatiotemporal crowdsensing (SC) play an important role. Mobile devices equipped with sensors could act as workers to collect and process data for uploading. In the task allocation process, a fully static allocation fails to meet the needs of realistic conditions, while a completely dynamic allocation fails to achieve the desired results. Therefore, we assume a task-scheduled execution scenario that combines the above two conditions. In the pre-allocation process, an original time location constraints (ORTA) allocation algorithm is first proposed. Then it is optimized (OPTA) to fully utilize the remaining time of the workers and increase the matched number. In addition, the design of the incentive mechanism is an effective means to improve the task completion rate of the platform. To efficiently utilize the limited platform budget in the long run, a Q-learning-based algorithm is proposed to identify target inspire tasks and subsequently increase their reward to attract workers’ participation. Finally, comparison experiments are conducted on real datasets to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm. Furthermore, the experiments on a Raspberry Pi local terminal are conducted under a satellite-based environment.

With the widespread use of GPS-enabled smart devices and the increased availability of wireless networks, mobile crowdsourcing system (MCS) has recently been proposed as a framework that automatically requests workers to perform location sensitive tasks. In the task allocation problem of MCS, existing algorithms lack consideration of the impact of nonadjacent and discontinuous execution of tasks on task allocation. Workers may have different task preferences in different time periods. Nonadjacent and discontinuous tasks provide important correlations for understanding workers’ behavior. This article introduces a novel task allocation algorithm based on spatiotemporal attention network (STATA). STATA takes into account factors such as the spatiotemporal distribution of tasks and workers as well as the location preferences and abilities of workers, and integrates them into a unified network for modeling. First, all historical tasks performed by workers are aggregated to obtain the correlation of all historical tasks. Then, the most plausible candidate tasks are recalled from the weighted representation for allocation. STATA utilizes the spatiotemporal attention mechanism to capture the relationship between these factors, ultimately improving the accuracy of task allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the STATA model exhibits superior performance in terms of task allocation accuracy and practical application capabilities.

Mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) is a new paradigm that uses various mobile devices to collect sensed data. Mobile edge computing (MEC) can effectively utilize the device resources of mobile edge, greatly relieve the pressure of network bandwidth and improve the response speed. In this article, we construct a four-party evolutionary game model consisting of the platform, crowd workers, task requesters, and edge servers. The computing tasks are conducted on edge servers, which greatly reduce remote data transmission and network operating costs and improve service quality. Taking into account the collusion between the platform and workers, and that between the platform and requesters, we analyze the stability of the strategic equilibrium in MCS using replicator dynamics methods. The optimal payoff strategies of the participants in different initial states are obtained. To prevent cheating and false-reporting problems, reward and punishment strategies are provided. Finally, the stability of the equilibrium of the four-party evolutionary game system is verified by simulation experiments, and an incentive strategy is designed to motivate all parties to choose the trust strategies.

Collaborative Mobile Crowdsourcing (CMCS) allows platforms to recruit worker teams to collaboratively execute complex sensing tasks. The efficiency of such collaborations could be influenced by trust relationships among workers. To obtain the asymmetric trust values among all workers in the social network, the Trust Reinforcement Evaluation Framework (TREF) based on Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) is proposed in this paper. The task completion effect is comprehensively calculated by considering the workers' ability benefits, distance benefits, and trust benefits in this paper. The worker recruitment problem is modeled as an Undirected Complete Recruitment Graph (UCRG), for which a specific Tabu Search Recruitment (TSR) algorithm solution is proposed. An optimal execution team is recruited for each task by the TSR algorithm, and the collaboration team for the task is obtained under the constraint of privacy loss. To enhance the efficiency of the recruitment algorithm on a large scale and scope, the Mini-Batch K-Means clustering algorithm and edge computing technology are introduced, enabling distributed worker recruitment. Lastly, extensive experiments conducted on five real datasets validate that the recruitment algorithm proposed in this paper outperforms other baselines. Additionally, TREF proposed herein surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art trust evaluation methods in the literature.

With the development of mobile networks and intelligent equipment, as a new intelligent data sensing paradigm in large-scale sensor applications such as the industrial Internet of Things, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) assigns industrial sensing tasks to workers for data collection and sharing, which has created a bright future for building a strong industrial system and improving industrial services. How to design an effective worker selection mechanism to maximize the utility of crowdsourcing is the research hotspot of mobile sensing technologies. This article studies the problem of least workers selection to make large MCS system perform sensing tasks more effective and achieve certain coverage with certain constraints being meeting. A many-objective worker selection method is proposed to achieve the desired tradeoff and an optimization mechanism is designed based on the enhanced differential evolution algorithm to ensure data integrity and search solution optimality. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through a large scale of experimental evaluation datasets collected from real world.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the rapid popularization of 5 G networks, the data that needs to be processed in Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS) system is increasing every day. Traditional cloud computing can no longer meet the needs of crowdsourcing for real-time data and processing efficiency, thus, edge computing was born. Edge computing can be calculated at the edge of network so that greatly improve the efficiency and real-time performance of data processing. In addition, most of the existing privacy protection technologies are based on the trusted third parties. Therefore, in view of the semi-trustworthiness of edge servers and the transparency of blockchain, this paper proposes a triple real-time trajectory privacy protection mechanism (T-LGEB) based on edge computing and blockchain. Through combining the localized differential privacy and multiple probability extension mechanism, the T-LGEB mechanism is proposed to send the requests and data to the edge server in this paper. Then, through the spatio-temporal dynamic pseudonym mechanism proposed in the paper, the entire trajectory of task participants is divided into multiple unrelated trajectory segments with different pseudonymous identities in order to protect the trajectory privacy of task participants while ensuring high data availability and real-time data. Through a large number of experiments and comparative analysis on multiple real data sets, the proposed T-LGEB has extremely high privacy protection capabilities and data availability, and the resource consumption caused is relatively low.

With the advent of intelligent technology, the users of spatio-temporal crowdsourcing and their participation in the crowdsourcing tasks continue to increase exponentially. This poses new challenges to the crowdsourcing field. One of the core research areas of spatio-temporal crowdsourcing is task assignment. Most of the existing research on task assignment is focused on offline optimal task assignment, where, the platform has already learned all the information about workers and tasks beforehand. However, these studies cannot obtain good results in real-world situations. At the same time, online task assignment problems often result in local optimal assignment. To solve these problems, more attention needs to be paid to online task assignments and the arrival time of workers. This paper proposes an Online Bilateral Assignment (OBA) problem based on the online assignment model. The competitive ratio of the Greedy algorithm is analyzed according to the OBA problem model. Also, another solution to the OBA problem according to the Greedy algorithm, the Improved-Baseline algorithm, is proposed. Additionally, a Bilateral Online Priority Reassignment algorithm (BOPR) is proposed. The BOPR algorithm realizes real-time task/worker assignment through the bilateral assignment as a solution for online task assignment. In order to guarantee the number of matching tasks, a priority queue is designed in the BOPR algorithm. Considering the waiting time deadlines of tasks and workers and the error rate for priority ranking, it avoids tasks and workers waiting too long and assigns each task to the best possible extent. On this basis, a two-stage assignment strategy is designed for unsuccessful tasks, which could minimize the error rate of the task and significantly improve the efficiency of task assignment. Finally, through experiments on real data sets, the algorithm's performance in terms of global utility value and the number of matches is evaluated.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are being used widely in the fields of smart city, smart grid, environmental monitoring, Internet of Vehicles and other fields that need large-scale sensing data. However, the research on storage and computation power for IoT is still in its early stages. The game theory converts the interaction between two IoT devices into a game where the conflict is resolved by utilizing the game’s equilibrium conditions. Our goal with the game theory is to maximize the utility for every device in the IoT network. In this article, we review the recent game-theory-based solutions proposed in IoT networks. We summarize game theory concepts and categorize the common game models for ease of understanding for the reader. Later, we focus on analyzing solutions proposed in resource allocation, task scheduling, node selection, quality of service, and network security. Finally, we summarize research challenges and propose future research directions.

As a new paradigm to solve problems by gathering the intelligence of crowds, mobile crowdsourcing has become one of the hot spots in academic and industrial fields. Task requester, platform, and crowd workers are stakeholders in mobile crowdsourcing, which inevitably leads to conflicts of interest. In order to solve this problem, this article constructs a three-party evolutionary game model among task requester, platform, and crowd workers. This model also considers the collusion between crowd workers and the platform to make it more realistic. Then, the replication dynamics method is utilized to analyze the evolutionary stability strategy. The strategies of rewards and penalties are given to avoid free-riding and false-reporting problems. Finally, the stability of the equilibrium point in the three-party game system is verified through simulation experiments, and the effective methods to motivate each player to choose a trusted strategy are given.

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and fifth-generation (5G) networks, which have led to a surge in data processing and increased data transfer time, traditional cloud computing could no longer meet the needs of workers, so edge computing has emerged. Edge computing could meet the demand for low time consumption by processing data at the edge of the network and then transmitting it to a third-party platform. However, since the credibility of the third-party platform is unknown which can easily leak the privacy of workers. For the transparent mechanism of blockchain, a two-stage privacy protection mechanism based on blockchain is proposed to solve this problem. In the first stage, this paper proposes a double disturbance localized differential privacy (DDLDP) algorithm to disturb the location information of workers. In the second stage, all the sensing data are uploaded to the blockchain through edge nodes, processed by the edge cloud, and fed back to the requester. Blockchain technology not only guarantees the integrity of sensing data, but also prevents the possibility of third-party platforms from leaking workers' privacy. Through extensive performance evaluation and comparative experiments on real data sets, the DDLDP algorithm could effectively protect the privacy of workers and has higher service quality and data availability.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, various application requirements have put forward higher requirements for data transmission bandwidth and real‐time data processing. Mobile edge computing (MEC) can greatly alleviate the pressure on network bandwidth and improve the response speed by effectively using the device resources of mobile edge. Research on mobile crowdsourcing in edge computing has become a hot spot. Hence, we studied resource utilization issues between edge mobile devices, namely, crowdsourcing scenarios in mobile edge computing. We aimed to design an incentive mechanism to ensure the long‐term participation of users and high quality of tasks. This paper designs a long‐term incentive mechanism based on game theory. The long‐term incentive mechanism is to encourage participants to provide long‐term and continuous quality data for mobile crowdsourcing systems. The multistrategy repeated game‐based incentive mechanism (MSRG incentive mechanism) is proposed to guide participants to provide long‐term participation and high‐quality data. The proposed mechanism regards the interaction between the worker and the requester as a repeated game and obtains a long‐term incentive based on the historical information and discount factor. In addition, the evolutionary game theory and the Wright‐Fisher model in biology are used to analyze the evolution of participants’ strategies. The optimal discount factor is found within the range of discount factors based on repeated games. Finally, simulation experiments verify the existing crowdsourcing dilemma and the effectiveness of the incentive mechanism. The results show that the proposed MSRG incentive mechanism has a long‐term incentive effect for participants in mobile crowdsourcing systems.

Trust relationships have an important effect on coalition formation. In many real scenarios, agents usually cooperate with others in their trusted social networks to form coalitions. Therefore, the trust value between agents should constrain the utility of forming coalitions when cooperating. At the same time, most studies ignore the impact of the number of coalitions in coalition structure. In this paper, the coalition formation of trust‐utility relationship in social networks is researched. Each node represents an agent, and the trust‐utility networks that connect the agents constrain coalition formation. To solve the task assignment problem, this paper proposes a greedy algorithm which is based on the edge contraction. Under the premise of ensuring the agent’s individually rationality, this algorithm simulates the formation process of coalitions between agents through continuous edge contraction and constrains the number of forming coalitions to k to solve the problem of coalition structure. Finally, the simulation results show that our algorithm has great scalability because of the ability of solving the coalition structure on a large‐scale agent set. It can meet the growing demand for data intensive applications in the Internet of things and artificial intelligence era. The quality of the solution is much higher than other algorithms, and the running time is negligible.

In the participatory sensing framework, privacy protection of the Internet of Things (IoT) is very important. In this article, cryptography-based methods are utilized to protect participants' privacy information in unsecured network channels for dynamic and real-time sensing tasks. The edge computing paradigm is introduced in the traditional participatory sensing framework to reduce network latency. Then, the Rivest Cipher 4 stream cipher and logistic mapping are combined to deal with the problems of participants' limited resources and untruthful third-party platforms. Finally, the product algebra and logistic mapping are combined to deal with the problems of large numbers of participants' access and poor randomness of keystream. Through extensive performance evaluation and comparison experiments on the real-world data, the effectiveness and adaptation of the proposed privacy protection based on stream cipher are verified. It could effectively solve the problem of poor network latency and improve the privacy protection level of IoT.

In spatiotemporal crowdsourcing applications, sensing data uploaded by participants usually contain spatiotemporal sensitive data. If application servers publish the unprocessed sensing data directly, it is easy to expose the privacy of participants. In addition, application servers usually adopt the static publishing mechanism, which is easy to produce problems such as poor timeliness and large information loss for spatiotemporal crowdsourcing applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a spatiotemporal privacy protection (STPP) method based on dynamic clustering methods to solve the privacy protection problem for crowd participants in spatiotemporal crowdsourcing systems. Firstly, the working principles of a dynamic privacy protection mechanism are introduced. Then, based on k-anonymity and l-diversity, the spatiotemporal sensitive data are anonymized. In addition, this paper designs the dynamic k-anonymity algorithm based on the previous anonymous results. Through extensive performance evaluation on real-world data, compared with existing methods, the proposed STPP algorithm could effectively solve the problem of poor timeliness and improve the privacy protection level while reducing the information loss of sensing data.

With the rapid development of Industry 5.0 and mobile devices, the research of mobile crowdsensing networks has become an important research focus. Task allocation is an important research content that can inspire crowd workers to participate in crowd tasks and provide truthful sensed data in mobile crowdsourcing systems. However, how to inspire crowd workers to participate in crowd tasks and provide truthful sensed data still has many challenges. In this article, based on the Markov model and collaborative filtering model, the similarities, trajectory prediction, dwell time, and trust degree are considered to propose the Markov and Collaborative filtering-based Task Recommendation (MCTR) model. Then, based on the Walrasian equilibrium, the optimum solution is researched to maximize the social welfare of mobile crowdsourcing systems. Finally, the comparison experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed multiobjective optimization and the Markov-based task allocation with other methods. Through comparison experiments, the efficiency and adaptation of mobile crowdsourcing systems could be improved by the proposed task allocation.

Mobile crowdsourcing is an emerging crowdsourcing paradigm, which generates large-scale sensing tasks and sensing data. One of the major issues in mobile crowdsourcing is how to maximize social welfare through selecting appropriate sensing tasks for crowd workers and selecting appropriate workers for sensing tasks such that it can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of mobile crowdsourcing. This paper proposes an incentive mechanism to maximize social welfare for mobile crowdsourcing and, respectively, investigates worker-centric task selection and platform-centric worker selection. This paper applies an optimization algorithm in task selection for mobile crowdsourcing systems. A discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm for worker-centric task selection is designed to maximize the utilities of workers. In addition, a platform-centric worker selection method, which integrates multiattribute auction and two-stage auction, is proposed to maximize the utility of the platform. The performance of the proposed incentive mechanism is evaluated through experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed incentive mechanism can improve the efficiency and truthfulness of mobile crowdsourcing effectively.

Crowdsourcing is the perfect show of collective intelligence, and the key of finishing perfectly the crowdsourcing task is to allocate the appropriate task to the appropriate worker. Now the most of crowdsourcing platforms select tasks through tasks search, but it is short of individual recommendation of tasks. Tag-semantic task recommendation model based on deep learning is proposed in the paper. In this paper, the similarity of word vectors is computed, and the semantic tags similar matrix database is established based on the Word2vec deep learning. The task recommending model is established based on semantic tags to achieve the individual recommendation of crowdsourcing tasks. Through computing the similarity of tags, the relevance between task and worker is obtained, which improves the robustness of task recommendation. Through conducting comparison experiments on Tianpeng web dataset, the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed model are verified.