Methods for task allocation via agent coalition formation
Artificial Intelligence
Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees
Artificial Intelligence
Generating Coalition Structures with Finite Bound from the Optimal Guarantees
AAMAS '04 Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
Coalition Structure Generation in Task-Based Settings Based on Cardinality Structure
Agent Computing and Multi-Agent Systems
Simulated Annealing for Multi-agent Coalition Formation
KES-AMSTA '09 Proceedings of the Third KES International Symposium on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications
Searching for overlapping coalitions in multiple virtual organizations
Information Sciences: an International Journal
Coalition structure generation with GRASP
AIMSA'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Artificial intelligence: methodology, systems, and applications
Considering inter-task resource constraints in task allocation
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Coalitional games via network flows
IJCAI'13 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence
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The coalition formation process, in which a number of independent, autonomous agents come together to act as a collective, is an important form of interaction in multi-agent systems. However, one of the main problems that hinders the wide spread adoption of coalition formation technologies is the computational complexity of coalition structure generation. That is, once a group of agents has been identified, how can it be partitioned in order to maximise the social payoff? To date, most work on this problem has concentrated on simple characteristic function games. However, this lacks the notion of tasks which makes it more difficult to apply it in many applications. Against this background, this paper studies coalition structure generation in a general task-based setting. Specifically, we show that this problem is NP-hard and that the minimum number of coalition structures that need to be searched through in order to establish a solution within a bound from the optimal is exponential to the number of agents. We then go onto develop an anytime algorithm that can establish a solution within a bound from the optimal with a minimal search and can reduce the bound further if time permits.