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Minimum search to establish worst-case guarantees in coalition structure generation

Minimum search to establish worst-case guarantees in coalition structure generation
Minimum search to establish worst-case guarantees in coalition structure generation
Coalition formation is a fundamental research topic in multi-agent systems. In this context, while it is desirable to generate a coalition structure that maximizes the sum of the values of the coalitions, the space of possible solutions is often too large to allow exhaustive search. Thus, a fundamental open question in this area is the following: Can we search through only a subset of coalition structures, and be guaranteed to find a solution that is within a desirable bound (beta) from optimum? If so, what is the minimum such subset? To date, the above question has only been partially answered by Sandholm et al. in their seminal work on anytime coalition structure generation [Sandholm et al., 1999]. More specifically, they identified minimum subsets to be searched for two particular bounds: β = n and β = [n/2]. Nevertheless, the question remained open for other values of β. In this paper, we provide the complete answer to this question.
978-1-57735-513-7
338-343
Rahwan, Talal
476029f3-5484-4747-9f44-f63f3687083c
Michalak, Tomasz
e24bfee3-bd75-4cca-8220-6f3c2f39dc38
Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30
Rahwan, Talal
476029f3-5484-4747-9f44-f63f3687083c
Michalak, Tomasz
e24bfee3-bd75-4cca-8220-6f3c2f39dc38
Jennings, Nicholas R.
ab3d94cc-247c-4545-9d1e-65873d6cdb30

Rahwan, Talal, Michalak, Tomasz and Jennings, Nicholas R. (2011) Minimum search to establish worst-case guarantees in coalition structure generation. IJCAI'11. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume One, Barcelona, Spain. 16 - 22 Jul 2011. pp. 338-343 . (doi:10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-066).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Other)

Abstract

Coalition formation is a fundamental research topic in multi-agent systems. In this context, while it is desirable to generate a coalition structure that maximizes the sum of the values of the coalitions, the space of possible solutions is often too large to allow exhaustive search. Thus, a fundamental open question in this area is the following: Can we search through only a subset of coalition structures, and be guaranteed to find a solution that is within a desirable bound (beta) from optimum? If so, what is the minimum such subset? To date, the above question has only been partially answered by Sandholm et al. in their seminal work on anytime coalition structure generation [Sandholm et al., 1999]. More specifically, they identified minimum subsets to be searched for two particular bounds: β = n and β = [n/2]. Nevertheless, the question remained open for other values of β. In this paper, we provide the complete answer to this question.

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Published date: July 2011
Venue - Dates: IJCAI'11. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume One, Barcelona, Spain, 2011-07-16 - 2011-07-22
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 272270
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/272270
ISBN: 978-1-57735-513-7
PURE UUID: dd2b120d-9ee2-4930-8d5c-00df5d0a9668

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Date deposited: 11 May 2011 08:03
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:51

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Contributors

Author: Talal Rahwan
Author: Tomasz Michalak
Author: Nicholas R. Jennings

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