International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools 14(6), pp. 887-899.
ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: 10.1142/S0218213005002454
Abstract: We study the problem of fair resource allocation in a simple cooperative multi-agent setting where we have k agents and a set of n objects to be allocated to those agents. Each object is associated with a weight represented by a positive integer or real number. We would like to allocate all objects to the agents so that each object is allocated to only one agent and the weight is distributed fairly. We adopt the fairness index popularized by the networking community as our measure of fairness, and study centralized algorithms for fair resource allocation. Based on the relationship between our problem and number partitioning, we devise a greedy algorithm for fair resource allocation that runs in polynomial time but is not guaranteed to find the optimal solution, and a complete anytime algorithm that finds the optimal solution but runs in exponential time. Then we study the phase transition behavior of the complete algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate that the greedy algorithm actually performs very well and returns almost perfectly fair allocations.
Bibtex:
@article{,
title={Fair resource allocation in a simple multi-agent setting: search algorithms and experimental evaluation},
author={Raftopoulou, Paraskevi and Koubarakis, Manolis and Stergiou, Kostas and Triantafillou, Peter},
journal={International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools},
volume={14},
number={06},
pages={887--899},
year={2005},
publisher={World Scientific},
DOI={10.1142/S0218213005002454},
}
Reference Type: Journal Article
Subject Area(s): Computer Science