Local search for stable marriage problems

The stable marriage (SM) problem has a wide variety of practical applications, ranging from matching resident doctors to hospitals, to matching students to schools, or more generally to any two-sided market. In the classical formulation, n men and n women express their preferences (via a strict total order) over the members of the other sex. Solving a SM problem means finding a stable marriage where stability is an envy-free notion: no man and woman who are not married to each other would both prefer each other to their partners or to being single. We consider both the classical stable marriage problem and one of its useful variations (denoted SMTI) where the men and women express their preferences in the form of an incomplete preference list with ties over a subset of the members of the other sex. Matchings are permitted only with people who appear in these preference lists, an we try to find a stable matching that marries as many people as possible. Whilst the SM problem is polynomi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Mirco Gelain, Maria Silvia Pini, Francesca Rossi, Kristen Brent Venable, Toby Walsh
• Keywords: CORR 2010, Education, Problems, Sm Problems, Stable Marriages