Anytime Heuristic for Weighted Matching Through Altruism-Inspired Behavior



Danassis, Panayiotis, Filos-Ratsikas, Aris ORCID: 0000-0001-7868-8114 and Faltings, Boi
(2019) Anytime Heuristic for Weighted Matching Through Altruism-Inspired Behavior. In: Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence {IJCAI-19}, 2019-8-10 - 2019-8-16, Macao, China.

[img] Text
ijcai19.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript

Download (727kB) | Preview

Abstract

We present a novel anytime heuristic (ALMA), inspired by the human principle of altruism, for solving the assignment problem. ALMA is decentralized, completely uncoupled, and requires no communication between the participants. We prove an upper bound on the convergence speed that is polynomial in the desired number of resources and competing agents per resource; crucially, in the realistic case where the aforementioned quantities are bounded independently of the total number of agents/resources, the convergence time remains constant as the total problem size increases. We have evaluated ALMA under three test cases: (i) an anti-coordination scenario where agents with similar preferences compete over the same set of actions, (ii) a resource allocation scenario in an urban environment, under a constant-time constraint, and finally, (iii) an on-line matching scenario using real passenger-taxi data. In all of the cases, ALMA was able to reach high social welfare, while being orders of magnitude faster than the centralized, optimal algorithm. The latter allows our algorithm to scale to realistic scenarios with hundreds of thousands of agents, e.g., vehicle coordination in urban environments.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Uncontrolled Keywords: cs.MA, cs.MA, cs.AI
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 21 Aug 2019 08:44
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 00:36
DOI: 10.24963/ijcai.2019/31
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3051039