Near-optimal anytime coalition structure generation (2007)

Content Provider	CiteSeerX
Author	Ramchurn, Sarvapali D. Dang, Viet Dung Jennings, Nicholas R. Rahwan, Talal
Description	In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07
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 algorithm for coalition structure generation that is faster than previous 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 the same size. 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 0.0129 % of the time to find the optimal value by the state of the art dynamic programming algorithm (for 20 agents). 1
File Format	PDF
Publisher Date	2007-01-01
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Small Set Previous Anytime Algorithm Optimal Value Multi-agent System Near-optimal Anytime Coalition Structure Generation Major Research Challenge Art Dynamic Programming Algorithm Effective Coalition Non-redundant Coalition Structure Online Heuristic Search Coalition Structure Generation Tight Bound
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Proceeding Conference Proceedings Article