TruCentive: A Game-theoretic Incentive Platform for Trustworthy Mobile Crowdsourcing Parking Services

The shortage of parking in crowded urban areas causes severe societal problems such as traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and many others. Recently, crowdsourced parking, where smartphone users are exploited to collect real-time parking availability information, has attracted significant attention. However, existing crowdsourced parking information systems suffer from low user participation rate and data quality due to the lack of carefully designed incentive schemes. In this paper, we address the incentive problem of trustworthy crowdsourced parking information systems by presenting an incentive platform named TruCentive, where high utility parking data can be obtained from unreliable crowds of mobile users. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we provide hierarchical incentives to stimulate the participation of mobile users for contributing parking information. Second, by introducing utility-related incentives, our platform encourages participants to contribute high utility data and thereby enhances the quality of collected data. Third, our active confirmation scheme validates the parking information utility by game-theoretically formulated incentive protocols. The active confirming not only validates the utility of contributed data but re-sells the high utility data as well. Our evaluation through user study on Amazon Mechanical Turk and simulation study demonstrate the feasibility and stability of TruCentive incentive platform.