Allocation of indivisible goods: a general model and some complexity results

Many industrial or research activities are so expensive that it is often benefitable for the involved agents to cofund the construction or the purchase of a common required resource. This resource will then be exploited in common, therefore in a shared way. The rules for resource sharing should take account of the possibly antagonistic preferences: each agent wants to maximize its own satisfaction, whereas, from the collective point of view, decisions which both are equitable and exploit the resource in an optimal way are looked for. We give in this article a formal model for indivisible goods resource sharing without monetary compensations and with arbitrary feasability constraints. We also give some complexity results about this model. The model is applied to a real-world case, namely satellite resource sharing. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.4 [Computing Methodologies]: Artificial Intelligence— Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods General Terms Theory Keyword...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Sylvain Bouveret, Michel Lemaître, Hélène Fargier, Jérôme Lang
• Keywords: ATAL 2005, Common Required Resource, Resource Sharing, Satellite Resource Sharing