Generating Coalition Structures with Finite Bound from the Optimal Guarantees

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 to maximise 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.'s algorithm [8] (the only oth...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Viet Dung Dang, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: ATAL 2004, Coalition Formation, Coalition Formation Process, Coalition Structure Generation, Intelligent Agents