Towards intelligent and trustworthy task assignments for 5G-enabled industrial communication systems

Abstract

With the unprecedented prevalence of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and 5G technology, various applications supported by industrial communication systems have generated exponentially increased processing tasks, which makes task assignment inefficient due to insufficient workers. In this paper, an Intelligent and Trustworthy task assignment method based on Trust and Social relations (ITTS) is proposed for scenarios with many tasks and few workers. Specifically, ITTS first makes initial assignments based on trust and social influences, thereby transforming the complex large-scale industrial task assignment of the platform into the small-scale task assignment for each worker. Then, an intelligent Q-decision mechanism based on workers' social relation is proposed, which adopts the first-exploration-then-utilization principle to allocate tasks. Only when a worker cannot cope with the assigned tasks, it initiates dynamic worker recruitment, thus effectively solving the worker shortage problem as well as the cold start issue. More importantly, we consider trust and security issues, and evaluate the trust and social circles of workers by accumulating task feedback, to provide the platform a reference for worker recruitment, thereby creating a high-quality worker pool. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate ITTS outperforms two benchmark methods by increasing task completion rates by 56.49%-61.53% and profit by 42.34%-47.19%.

Keywords

Industrial Internet of Things / Insufficient workers / Trust evaluation / Social relation / Task assignment

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Mingfeng Huang: Methodology, Software, Writing - original draft. Anfeng Liu: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing - review & editing. Neal N. Xiong: Methodology, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Athanasios V. Vasilakos: Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 62072475 and No. 62302062, in part by the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Number 2023JJ40081.

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