Coalition structure generation: A survey

Abstract

Two fundamental algorithm-design paradigms are Tree Search and Dynamic Programming. The techniques used therein have been shown to complement one another when solving the complete set partitioning problem, also known as the coalition structure generation problem [5]. Inspired by this observation, we develop in this paper an algorithm to solve the coalition structure generation problem on graphs, where the goal is to identifying an optimal partition of a graph into connected subgraphs. More specifically, we develop a new depth-first search algorithm, and combine it with an existing dynamic programming algorithm due to Vinyals et al. [10]. The resulting hybrid algorithm is empirically shown to significantly outperform both its constituent parts when the subset-evaluation function happens to have certain intuitive properties.

Nash Stable Outcomes in Fractional Hedonic Games: Existence, Efficiency and Computation

“…Several works characterize the computational complexity of finding optimal solutions, providing efficient algorithms, hardness results and suitable approximations under different assumptions or variants of the problem (Aziz & de Keijzer, 2011;Bachrach, Kohli, Kolmogorov, & Zadimoghaddam, 2013;Bansal, Blum, & Chawla, 2004;Deng & Papadimitriou, 1994;Ohta, Conitzer, Ichimura, Sakurai, Iwasaki, & Yokoo, 2009;Rahwan, Michalak, Wooldridge, & Jennings, 2012;Ueda, Iwasaki, Yokoo, Silaghi, Hirayama, & Matsui, 2010;Voice, Polukarov, & Jennings, 2012). A recent survey of the different approaches in this setting is also available (Rahwan, Michalak, Wooldridge, & Jennings, 2015).…”

Decentralized Coalition Formation with Agent-based Combinatorial Heuristics

“…An overview can for example be found in (Rahwan et al, 2015). The main problems in all solutions arise with execution performance, solution quality or memory requirements (Rahwan et al, 2014).…”

“…Classical approaches to coalition formation (Rahwan et al, 2015;Gensollen et al, 2015;Vinyals et al, 2012;Bistaffa et al, 2012) are either not decentralized and thus do not fully comply with requirements resulting from the large number of decentralized energy resources (Nieße et al, 2012), do not take into account individually flexibilities and operation constraints of individual units or rely on integrated models and thus on specific, restricted implementations. Other approaches specialize to sub use cases, e. g. electric vehicles (Bazzan and de O. Ramos, 2015), to ease computation.…”

“…In recent years, researchers have investigated a variety of approaches to coalition structure generation as a major challenge in multi-agent systems (Rahwan et al, 2014). An overview can for example be found in (Rahwan et al, 2015).…”

Power and welfare in bargaining for coalition structure formation

“…In the context of this table, a number of non-strategic models are aimed at generating a coalition structure that is optimal at a system-wide level (for a thorough analysis of the computational complexity of the optimal coalition structure generation problem, see [4]). For a survey of these models, see [34]. One key assumption that underlies all the non-strategic models is that a central entity is able to impose a socially optimal structure on all the agents.…”