2010/04/16 by Nicola Di Mauro, Di Mauro, Nicola, Teresa M. A. Basile +5
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Game Theory and Applications #Game Theory and Voting Systems #cs.AI #cs.MA
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1004.2880
12 pages, Submitted to an International Conference
arxiv created 2010/04/16 · arxiv updated 2010/04/19
The coalition structure formation problem represents an active research area in multi-agent systems. A coalition structure is defined as a partition of the agents involved in a system into disjoint coalitions. The problem of finding the optimal coalition structure is NP-complete. In order to find the optimal solution in a combinatorial optimization problem it is theoretically possible to enumerate the solutions and evaluate each. But this approach is infeasible since the number of solutions often grows exponentially with the size of the problem. In this paper we present a greedy adaptive search procedure (GRASP) to efficiently search the space of coalition structures in order to find an optimal one. Experiments and comparisons to other algorithms prove the validity of the proposed method in solving this hard combinatorial problem.