Near-optimal anytime coalition structure generation
OA Location
Author(s)
Rahwan, T
Ramchurn, SD
Dang, VD
Jennings, NR
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Forming effective coalitions is a major research challenge in the field of multi-agent systems. Central to this endeavour is the problem of determining the best set of agents that should participate in a given team. To this end, in this paper, we present a novel, anytime algorithms designed for this purpose. Our algorithm can generate solutions that either have a tight bound from the optimal or are optimal (depending on the objective) and works by partitioning the space in terms of a small set of elements that represent structures which contain coalitions of particular sizes. It then performs an online heuristic search that prunes the space and only considers valid and non-redundant coalition structures. We empirically show that we are able to find solutions that are, in the worst case, 99% efficient in 0.0043% of the time to find the optimal value by the state of the art dynamic programming (DP) algorithm (for 20 agents), using 33% less memory.
Date Issued
2007
Citation
2007, pp.2365-2371
Start Page
2365
End Page
2371
Identifier
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/263074/
Source
20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Computer Science
Publication Status
Unpublished