Evolutionary solving of the debts' clearing problem

Abstract

The debts' clearing problem is about clearing all the debts in a group of n entities (persons, companies etc.) using a minimal number of money transaction operations. The problem is known to be NP-hard in the strong sense. As for many intractable problems, techniques from the field of artificial intelligence are useful in finding solutions close to optimum for large inputs. An evolutionary algorithm for solving the debts' clearing problem is proposed.