A feasible and practical coalition formation mechanism leveraging compromise and task relationships

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that compromise may facilitate coalition formation and increase agent utilities. In this study we leverage on those results. We devise a novel coalition formation mechanism that enhances compromise. Our mechanism can utilize information on task relationships to reduce formation complexity. The suggested mechanism works well with both cardinal and ordinal task values. Via experiments we show that the use of the suggested compromise-based coalition formation mechanism provides significant savings in the computation and communication complexity of coalition formation. Our results also show that when information on task relationships is used, the complexity of coalition formation is further reduced. We demonstrate successful use of the mechanism for collaborative information filtering, where agents combine linguistic rules to analyze documents' contents. © 2006 IEEE.