A Hierarchical Dynamic Programming Algorithm for Optimal Coalition Structure Generation

Abstract

We present a new Dynamic Programming (DP) formulation of the Coalition Structure Generation (CSG) problem based on imposing a hierarchical organizational structure over the agents. We show the efficiency of this formulation by deriving DyPE, a new optimal DP algorithm which significantly outperforms current DP approaches in speed and memory usage. In the classic case, in which all coalitions are feasible, DyPE has half the memory requirements of other DP approaches. On graph-restricted CSG, in which feasibility is restricted by a (synergy) graph, DyPE has either the same or lower computational complexity depending on the underlying graph structure of the problem. Our empirical evaluation shows that DyPE outperforms the state-of-the-art DP approaches by several orders of magnitude in a large range of graph structures (e.g. for certain scalefree graphs DyPE reduces the memory requirements by $10^6$ and solves problems that previously needed hours in minutes).