Using Computational Intelligence Algorithms to Solve the Coalition Structure Generation Problem in Coalitional Skill Games

Coalitional skill games (CSGs) are a simple model of cooperation in an uncertain environment where each agent has a set of skills that are required to accomplish a variety of tasks and each task requires a set of skills to be completed, but each skill is very hard to be quantified and can only be qualitatively expressed. Thus far, many computational questions surrounding CSGs have been studied. However, to the best of our knowledge, the coalition structure generation problem (CSGP), as a central issue of CSGs, is extremely challenging and has not been well solved. To this end, two different computational intelligence algorithms are herein evaluated: binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and binary differential evolution (BDE). In particular, we develop the two stochastic search algorithms with two-dimensional binary encoding and corresponding heuristic for individual repairs. After that, we discuss some fundamental properties of the proposed heuristic. Finally, we compare the improved BPSO and BDE with the state-of-the-art algorithms for solving CSGP in CSGs. The experimental results show that our algorithms can find the same near optimal solutions with the existing approaches but take extremely short time, especially under the large problem size.