{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Near-Optimal Anytime Coalition Structure Generation","authors":[{"name":"Talal Rahwan","slug":"talal-rahwan","given":"Talal","family":"Rahwan","affiliation":""},{"name":"Sarvapali D. Ramchurn","slug":"sarvapali-d-ramchurn","given":"Sarvapali D.","family":"Ramchurn","affiliation":""},{"name":"Viet Dung Dang","slug":"viet-dung-dang","given":"Viet Dung","family":"Dang","affiliation":""},{"name":"Nicholas R. Jennings","slug":"nicholas-r-jennings","given":"Nicholas R.","family":"Jennings","affiliation":""}],"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 articipate 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 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.","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/381","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/0381.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/381.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/bibtex/381","volume":{"slug":"2007","title":"Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2007","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2007/","year":2007,"location":"Hyderabad, India","dates":"","editors":"Ramon López de Mántaras","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":381,"pages":{"first":2365,"last":2370},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}