Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees based on cardinality structure

  • Authors:

  • She-Xiong Su;Shan-Li Hu;Chun-Yi Shi

  • Affiliations:

  • Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China;Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Coalition formation is a key topic in multiagent systems. One may prefer a coalition structure that maximizes the sum of the values of the coalitions, but often the number of coalition structures is too large to allow exhaustive search for the optimal one. But then, can the coalition structure found via a partial search be guaranteed to be within a bound from optimum? Sandholm et al. showed that it suffices to search the lowest two levels of the coalition structure graph in order to establish a worst case bound K(n). Dang et al. presented an algorithm that takes a step further to search those coalition structures whose biggest coalition's cardinality is greater than or equal to ⌈n(k − 1)/(k + 1)⌉, which is the best result known so far. Against this background, this paper reports on a novel anytime algorithm based on cardinality structure that only have to take a step further to search those coalition structures whose cardinality structure is in the CCS(n, b). Consequently, the algorithm reported in this paper is obviously better than that of Sandholm et al. (up to 1035 times faster when n=100, K=2) and Dang et al (up to 1018 times faster when n=100, K=3).