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Novel Heuristics for Coalition Structure Generation in Multi-Agent Systems

Novel Heuristics for Coalition Structure Generation in Multi-Agent Systems
Novel Heuristics for Coalition Structure Generation in Multi-Agent Systems
A coalition is a set of self-interested agents that agree to cooperate for achieving a set of goals. Coalition formation is an active area of research in multi-agent systems nowadays. Central to this endeavour is the problem of determining which of the many possible coalitions to form in order to achieve some goal, which is called coalition structure generation. Coalition structure generation problem is extremely challenging due to the number of possible solutions that need to be examined, which grows exponentially with the number of agents involved. Generally, agents would enumerate all possible coalitions, store them in memory, and then try to construct the coalition structure that maximizes the sum of the values of the coalitions. However, this is not feasible when we have a large number of agents, and other constraints on execution time, and memory. Hence, there is a need to develop an algorithm that can generate solutions rapidly for large number of agents while providing bounds on the value of solution as well. With this in mind, we propose two new heuristics, namely LocalSearch and GreedySearch, for generating the coalition structure, which satisfy these properties. We empirically show that these heuristics are able to return ‘good-enough’ solutions in very short time. Furthermore, they enhance the performance of state of the art algorithm, IP (proposed by [12]) in terms of increased lower bound, anytime property, and solution quality. Furthermore, we implemented different heuristics for selecting a sub-space in the IP algorithm and show how the time required to find a good-enough solution depends on the selection of a sub-space in the IP algorithm.
Ghazanfar, Mustansar
9452876d-46e5-4c7d-9120-c486f448632d
Prugel-Bennett, Adam
b107a151-1751-4d8b-b8db-2c395ac4e14e
Ghazanfar, Mustansar
9452876d-46e5-4c7d-9120-c486f448632d
Prugel-Bennett, Adam
b107a151-1751-4d8b-b8db-2c395ac4e14e

Ghazanfar, Mustansar and Prugel-Bennett, Adam (2010) Novel Heuristics for Coalition Structure Generation in Multi-Agent Systems. The 2010 International Conference of Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Systems, London, United Kingdom. 30 Jun - 02 Jul 2010. (Submitted)

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

A coalition is a set of self-interested agents that agree to cooperate for achieving a set of goals. Coalition formation is an active area of research in multi-agent systems nowadays. Central to this endeavour is the problem of determining which of the many possible coalitions to form in order to achieve some goal, which is called coalition structure generation. Coalition structure generation problem is extremely challenging due to the number of possible solutions that need to be examined, which grows exponentially with the number of agents involved. Generally, agents would enumerate all possible coalitions, store them in memory, and then try to construct the coalition structure that maximizes the sum of the values of the coalitions. However, this is not feasible when we have a large number of agents, and other constraints on execution time, and memory. Hence, there is a need to develop an algorithm that can generate solutions rapidly for large number of agents while providing bounds on the value of solution as well. With this in mind, we propose two new heuristics, namely LocalSearch and GreedySearch, for generating the coalition structure, which satisfy these properties. We empirically show that these heuristics are able to return ‘good-enough’ solutions in very short time. Furthermore, they enhance the performance of state of the art algorithm, IP (proposed by [12]) in terms of increased lower bound, anytime property, and solution quality. Furthermore, we implemented different heuristics for selecting a sub-space in the IP algorithm and show how the time required to find a good-enough solution depends on the selection of a sub-space in the IP algorithm.

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Novel_Heuristics_for_Coalition_Structure_Generation_in_Multiagents_Systems.pdf - Accepted Manuscript
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More information

Submitted date: 16 July 2010
Additional Information: Event Dates: 30 June - 2 July, 2010
Venue - Dates: The 2010 International Conference of Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Systems, London, United Kingdom, 2010-06-30 - 2010-07-02
Organisations: Southampton Wireless Group

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 268788
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/268788
PURE UUID: 43cedd88-aeee-4f5f-a510-f5629f3cd2bb

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Date deposited: 31 Mar 2010 20:20
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:15

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Contributors

Author: Mustansar Ghazanfar
Author: Adam Prugel-Bennett

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