Coalition structure generation in multi-agent systems with mixed externalities

Coalition structure generation (CSG) for multi-agent systems is a well-studied problem. A vast majority of the previous work and the state-of-the-art approaches to CSG assume a characteristic function form of the coalition values, where a coalition's value is independent of the other coalitions in the coalition structure. Recently, there has been interest in the more realistic partition function form of coalition values, where the value of a coalition is affected by how the other agents are partitioned, via externalities. We argue that in domains with externalities, a distributed/adaptive approach to CSG may be impractical, and that a centralized approach to CSG is more suitable. However, the most recent studies in this direction have focused on cases where all externalities are either always positive or always negative, and results on coalition structure generation in more general settings (in particular, mixed externalities) are lacking. In this paper we propose a framework bas...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Bikramjit Banerjee, Landon Kraemer
• Keywords: ATAL 2010, Coalition, Coalition Structure, Coalition Structure Generation, Intelligent Agents