Generating Coalition Structures with Finite Bound from the Optimal Guarantees

  • Authors:

  • Viet Dung Dang;Nicholas R. Jennings

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Southampton;University of Southampton

  • Venue:
  • AAMAS '04 Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

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 multiagent systems. When effective, such coalitions can improve the performance of the individual agents and/or of the system as a whole. 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 tomaximise the social payoff? This problem has been shown to be NP-hard and even finding a sub-optimal solution requires searching an exponential number of solutions. Against this background, this paper reports on a novel anytime algorithm for coalition structure generation that produces solutions that are within a finite bound from the optimal. Our algorithm is benchmarked against Sandholm et al.ýs algorithm [8] (the only other known algorithm for this task that can also establish a worst-case bound from the optimal) and is shown to be up to 10^379 times faster (for systems containing 1000 agents) when small bounds from the optimal are desirable.