A Utility-Adjustable Reverse Auction Mechanism for UAV Data Collection Task Allocation
摘要
Due to their low cost, easy deployment, and high flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV) have become widely utilized for various data collection tasks across different fields. In particular, virtual service providers(VSP) recruit UAVs to collect data in their regions of interest(ROI), and leverage this data to offer a range of services, such as metaverse, traffic management, etc. To attract UAV owners to participate in the recruitment activities, VSP need to provide participating users with payments as rewards to motivate their participation. However, the recruitment demands of different VSPs for UAVs can vary significantly. For instance, time-sensitive tasks require timely recruitment of sufficient UAVs to ensure prompt completion of data collection tasks, necessitating higher payments to increase user enthusiasm. Conversely, in other types of tasks, the VSP’s objective might be to maximize its own utility. However, designing a general incentive mechanism for VSPs with different tasks that satisfies incentive compatibility(IC) and individual rationality(IR) to address the issues of UAV task allocation and payment is challenging. If VSP offer insufficient payments to users, it will be difficult to attract enough users to share their UAVs; conversely, offering excessive payments to users will harm the VSP’ profits. To address this problem, we propose a utility-adjustable reverse auction mechanism based on reverse Vickrey-Clarke-Groves(VCG) auction and affine maximizer auction(AMA) theory to cope with different task scenarios. This incentive mechanism can maximize social welfare while flexibly adjusting the utility allocation between VSP and users, ensuring non-negative utility for both parties. Experimental results show that the mechanism has excellent performance.