Methods for Task Allocation via Agent Coalition Formation

Source: ScienceDirect Authors: Onn Shehory, Sarit Kraus Date: 1998-05 Venue: Artificial Intelligence 101(1-2)

Key points

• Treats task allocation as a coalition-formation problem rather than a one-agent-per-task scheduling problem.
• Focuses on tasks that either require groups or become more efficient when handled by groups.
• Presents distributed algorithms for disjoint coalitions, overlapping coalitions, and precedence-constrained tasks.
• The crucial design move is to make coalition structure explicit: the question is not just who works next, but which temporary group should exist at all.