COALITIONS AMONG INTELLIGENT AGENTS: A TRACTABLE CASE

Coalition formation is an important mechanism for cooperation in multiagent systems. In this paper we address the problem of coalition formation among self‐interested agents in superadditive task‐oriented domains. We assume that each agent has some “structure,” i.e., that it can be described by the values taken by a set of m nonnegative attributes that represent the resources w each agent is endowed with. By defining the coalitional value as a function V of w, we prove a sufficient condition for the existence of a stable payment configuration—in the sense of the core—in terms of certain properties of V. We apply these ideas to a simple case that can be described by a linear program and show that it is possible to compute for it—in polynomial time—an optimal task allocation and a stable payment configuration.

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