Coalition Formation Game for Task Allocation in the Social Network

Abstract

Coalition formation is an important research issue in the field of multi-agent, which can be widely applied in task allocation. This paper is different from traditional social task allocation problem. We propose that a mobile agent is assigned to each subtask that is decomposed by a complex task. Mobility refers to the ability of each agent to move to individuals with relevant professional capability. In this work, we model cooperation among mobile agents through coalition formation game in which mobile agents are graph-constrained and workers are in the social network. We propose a simple and distributed algorithm for the mobile agents who self-organize into independent disjoint coalitions. Compared with a non-cooperative approach where each mobile agent is self-interested to minimize its own operation cost, mobile agents decide to form disjoint coalitions to reduce the total operation cost. In addition, we prove the convergence of the algorithm. Simulation results show that, in different cases, coalition formation presents a performance improvement.