Fair Packing of Independent Sets

Abstract

In this work we add a graph theoretical perspective to a classical problem of fairly allocating indivisible items to several agents. Agents have different profit valuations of items and we allow an incompatibility relation between pairs of items described in terms of a conflict graph. Hence, every feasible allocation of items to the agents corresponds to a partial coloring, that is, a collection of pairwise disjoint independent sets. The sum of profits of vertices/items assigned to one color/agent should be optimized in a maxi-min sense. We derive complexity and algorithmic results for this problem, which is a generalization of the classical Partition and Independent Set problems. In particular, we show that the problem is strongly NP-complete in the classes of bipartite graphs and their line graphs, and solvable in pseudo-polynomial time in the classes of cocomparability graphs and biconvex bipartite graphs.