Operations Research Games: A Survey

This paper surveys the research area of cooperative games associated with several types of operations research problems in which various decision makers (players) are involved.Cooperating players not only face a joint optimisation problem in trying, e.g., to minimise total joint costs, but also face an additional allocation problem in how to distribute these joint costs back to the individual players.This interplay between optimisation and allocation is the main subject of the area of operations research games.It is surveyed on the basis of a distinction between the nature of the underlying optimisation problem: connection, routing, scheduling, production and inventory.cooperative games;operational research

Minimum Cost Spanning Tree Games and Spillover Stability

This paper discusses minimum cost spanning tree games and argues that the standard approach of using a transferable utility game to come up with a fair allocation of the total costs has some flaws. A new model of spillover games is presented, in which each agent's decision whether or not to cooperate is properly taken into account.minimum cost spanning tree problems, transferable utility games, spillovers

Hedonic Coalition Formation for Distributed Task Allocation among Wireless Agents

Autonomous wireless agents such as unmanned aerial vehicles or mobile base stations present a great potential for deployment in next-generation wireless networks. While current literature has been mainly focused on the use of agents within robotics or software applications, we propose a novel usage model for self-organizing agents suited to wireless networks. In the proposed model, a number of agents are required to collect data from several arbitrarily located tasks. Each task represents a queue of packets that require collection and subsequent wireless transmission by the agents to a central receiver. The problem is modeled as a hedonic coalition formation game between the agents and the tasks that interact in order to form disjoint coalitions. Each formed coalition is modeled as a polling system consisting of a number of agents which move between the different tasks present in the coalition, collect and transmit the packets. Within each coalition, some agents can also take the role of a relay for improving the packet success rate of the transmission. The proposed algorithm allows the tasks and the agents to take distributed decisions to join or leave a coalition, based on the achieved benefit in terms of effective throughput, and the cost in terms of delay. As a result of these decisions, the agents and tasks structure themselves into independent disjoint coalitions which constitute a Nash-stable network partition. Moreover, the proposed algorithm allows the agents and tasks to adapt the topology to environmental changes such as the arrival/removal of tasks or the mobility of the tasks. Simulation results show how the proposed algorithm improves the performance, in terms of average player (agent or task) payoff, of at least 30.26% (for a network of 5 agents with up to 25 tasks) relatively to a scheme that allocates nearby tasks equally among agents.Comment: to appear, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computin

Path Planning for Cooperative Routing of Air-Ground Vehicles

We consider a cooperative vehicle routing problem for surveillance and reconnaissance missions with communication constraints between the vehicles. We propose a framework which involves a ground vehicle and an aerial vehicle; the vehicles travel cooperatively satisfying the communication limits, and visit a set of targets. We present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation and develop a branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the path planning problem for the ground and air vehicles. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is corroborated through extensive computational experiments on several randomly generated instances

Cases in Cooperation and Cutting the Cake

Cooperative game;sharing problem

Stability and fairness in models with a multiple membership

This article studies a model of coalition formation for the joint production (and finance) of public projects, in which agents may belong to multiple coalitions. We show that, if projects are divisible, there always exists a stable (secession-proof) structure, i.e., a structure in which no coalition would reject a proposed arrangement. When projects are in- divisible, stable allocations may fail to exist and, for those cases, we resort to the least core in order to estimate the degree of instability. We also examine the compatibility of stability and fairness on metric environments with indivisible projects. To do so, we explore, among other things, the performance of several well-known solutions (such as the Shapley value, the nucleolus, or the Dutta-Ray value) in these environments.stability, fairness, membership, coalition formation

Cooperative game-theoretic features of cost sharing in location-routing

This article studies several variants of the location-routing problem using a cooperative game-theoretic framework. The authors derive characteristics in terms of subadditivity, convexity, and non-emptiness of the core. Moreover, for some of the game variants, it is shown that for facility opening costs substantially larger than the costs associated with routing, the core is always non-empty. The theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments aimed at illustrating the properties and deriving insights. Among others, it is observed that, while in general it is not possible to guarantee core allocations, in a huge majority of cases the core is non-empty