A mutual-selecting market-based mechanism for dynamic coalition formation

This article presents a novel market-based mechanism for a dynamic coalition formation problem backgrounded under real-time task allocation. Specifically, we first analyze the main factors of the real-time task allocation problem, and formulate the problem based on the coalition game theory. Then, we employ a social network for communication among distributed agents in this problem, and propose a negotiation mechanism for agents forming coalitions on timely emerging tasks. In this mechanism, we utilize an auction algorithm for real-time agent assignment on coalitions, and then design a mutual-selecting method to acquire better performance on agent utilization rate and task completion rate. And finally, our experimental results demonstrate that our market-based mechanism has a comparable performance in task completion rate to a decentralized approach (within 25% better on average) and a centralized dynamic coalition formation method (within 10% less on average performance).