{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"K-Swaps: Cooperative Negotiation for Solving Task-Allocation Problems","authors":[{"name":"Xiaoming Zheng","slug":"xiaoming-zheng","given":"Xiaoming","family":"Zheng","affiliation":""},{"name":"Sven Koenig","slug":"sven-koenig","given":"Sven","family":"Koenig","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"In this paper, we study distributed algorithms for cooperative agents that allow them to exchange their assigned tasks in order to reduce their team cost. We define a new type of contract, called K-swaps, that describes multiple task exchanges among multiple agents at a time, which generalizes the concept of single task exchanges. We design a distributed algorithm that constructs all possible K-swaps that reduce the team cost of a given task allocation and show that each agent typically only needs to communicate a small part of its local computation results to the other agents. We then demonstrate empirically that K-swaps can reduce the team costs of several existing task-allocation algorithms significantly even if K is small.Xiaoming Zheng, Sven Koenig","doi":null,"url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/70","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/0070.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/70.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/bibtex/70","volume":{"slug":"2009","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2009","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/","year":2009,"location":"Pasadena, California, USA","dates":"","editors":"Hiroaki Kitano","isbn":"","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":70,"pages":{"first":373,"last":378},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}