Utility Driven Job Selection Problem on Road Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of Utility Driven Job Selection on Road Networks for which the inputs are: a road network with the vertices as the set of Point-Of-Interests (Henceforth mentioned as POI) and the edges are road segments joining the POIs, a set of jobs with their originating POI, starting time, duration, and the utility. A worker can earn the utility associated with the job if (s)he performs this. As the jobs are originating at different POIs, the worker has to move from one POI to the other one to take up the job. Some budget is available for this purpose. Any two jobs can be taken up by the worker only if the finishing time of the first job plus traveling time from the POI of the first job to the second one should be less than or equal to the starting time of the second job. We call this constraint as the temporal constraint. The goal of this problem is to choose a subset of the jobs to maximize the earned utility such that the budget and temporal constraints should not be violated. We present two solution approaches with detailed analysis. First one of them works based on finding the locally optimal job at the end of every job and we call this approach as the Best First Search Approach. The other approach is based on the Nearest Neighbor Search on road networks. We perform a set of experiments with real-world trajectory datasets to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed solution approaches. We observe that the proposed approaches lead to more utility compared to baseline methods. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.