http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/36115/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/26275/ 2012-07-01T00:00:00Z This paper proposes a new variant of the task allocation problem, where the agents are connected in a social network and tasks arrive at the agents distributed over the network. We show that the complexity of this problem remains NP-complete. Moreover, it is not approximable within some factor. In contrast to this, we develop an efficient greedy algorithm for this problem. Our algorithm is completely distributed, and it assumes that agents have only local knowledge about tasks and resources. We conduct a broad set of experiments to evaluate the performance and scalability of the proposed algorithm in terms of solution quality and computation time. Three different types of networks, namely small-world, random and scale-free networks, are used to represent various social relationships among agents in realistic applications. The results demonstrate that our algorithm works well and also that it scales well to large-scale applications. In addition we consider the same problem in a setting where the agents holding the resources are self-interested. For this, we show how the optimal algorithm can be used to incentivize these agents to be truthful. However, the efficient greedy algorithm cannot be used in a truthful mechanism, therefore an alternative, cluster-based algorithm is proposed and evaluated. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/32170/ 2012-05-01T00:00:00Z We study the inverse power index problem for weighted voting games: the problem of finding a weighted voting game in which the power of the players is as close as possible to a certain target distribution. Our goal is to find algorithms that solve this problem exactly. Thereto, we study various subclasses of simple games, and their associated representation methods. We survey algorithms and impossibility results for the synthesis problem, i.e., converting a representation of a simple game into another representation. We contribute to the synthesis problem by showing that it is impossible to compute in polynomial time the list of ceiling coalitions of a game from its list of roof coalitions, and vice versa. Then, we proceed by studying the problem of enumerating the set of weighted voting games. We present first a naive algorithm for this, running in doubly exponential time. Using our knowledge of the synthesis problem, we then improve on this naive algorithm, and we obtain an enumeration algorithm that runs in quadratic exponential time. Moreover, we show that this algorithm runs in output-polynomial time, making it the best possible enumeration algorithm up to a polynomial factor. Finally, we propose an exact anytime algorithm for the inverse power index problem that runs in exponential time. By the genericity of our approach, our algorithm can be used to find a weighted voting game that optimizes any exponential time computable function. We implement our algorithm for the case of the normalized Banzhaf index, and we perform experiments in order to study performance and error convergence. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/26276/ 2011-02-28T00:00:00Z This paper proposes a new variant of the task allocation problem, where the agents are connected in a social network and tasks arrive at the agents distributed over the network. We show that the complexity of this problem remains NP-complete. Moreover, it is not approximable within some factor. In contrast to this, we develop an efficient greedy algorithm for this problem. Our algorithm is completely distributed, and it assumes that agents have only local knowledge about tasks and resources. We conduct a broad set of experiments to evaluate the performance and scalability of the proposed algorithm in terms of solution quality and computation time. Three different types of networks, namely small-world, random and scale-free networks, are used to represent various social relationships among agents in realistic applications. The results demonstrate that our algorithm works well and also that it scales well to large-scale applications. In addition we consider the same problem in a setting where the agents holding the resources are self-interested. For this, we show how the optimal algorithm can be used to incentivize these agents to be truthful. However, the efficient greedy algorithm cannot be used in a truthful mechanism, therefore an alternative, cluster-based algorithm is proposed and evaluated.