Risk-bounded formation of fuzzy coalitions among service agents.

Cooperative autonomous agents form coalitions in order ro share and combine resources and services to efficiently respond to market demands. With the variety of resources and services provided online today, there is a need for stable and flexible techniques to support the automation of agent coalition formation in this context. This paper describes an approach to the problem based on fuzzy coalitions. Compared with a classic cooperative game with crisp coalitions (where each agent is a full member of exactly one coalition), an agent can participate in multiple coalitions with varying degrees of involvement. This gives the agent more freedom and flexibility, allowing them to make full use of their resources, thus maximising utility, even if only comparatively small coalitions are formed. An important aspect of our approach is that the agents can control and bound the risk caused by the possible failure or default of some partner agents by spreading their involvement in diverse coalitions

Cooperative Games with Overlapping Coalitions

In the usual models of cooperative game theory, the outcome of a coalition formation process is either the grand coalition or a coalition structure that consists of disjoint coalitions. However, in many domains where coalitions are associated with tasks, an agent may be involved in executing more than one task, and thus may distribute his resources among several coalitions. To tackle such scenarios, we introduce a model for cooperative games with overlapping coalitions--or overlapping coalition formation (OCF) games. We then explore the issue of stability in this setting. In particular, we introduce a notion of the core, which generalizes the corresponding notion in the traditional (non-overlapping) scenario. Then, under some quite general conditions, we characterize the elements of the core, and show that any element of the core maximizes the social welfare. We also introduce a concept of balancedness for overlapping coalitional games, and use it to characterize coalition structures that can be extended to elements of the core. Finally, we generalize the notion of convexity to our setting, and show that under some natural assumptions convex games have a non-empty core. Moreover, we introduce two alternative notions of stability in OCF that allow a wider range of deviations, and explore the relationships among the corresponding definitions of the core, as well as the classic (non-overlapping) core and the Aubin core. We illustrate the general properties of the three cores, and also study them from a computational perspective, thus obtaining additional insights into their fundamental structure

Capacities and Games on Lattices: A Survey of Result

We provide a survey of recent developments about capacities (or fuzzy measures) and ccoperative games in characteristic form, when they are defined on more general structures than the usual power set of the universal set, namely lattices. In a first part, we give various possible interpretations and applications of these general concepts, and then we elaborate about the possible definitions of usual tools in these theories, such as the Choquet integral, the Möbius transform, and the Shapley value.capacity, fuzzy measure, game, lattice, Choquet integral,Shapley value

A Multicriteria Approach for the Evaluation of the Sustainability of Re-use of Historic Buildings in Venice

The paper presents a multiple criteria model for the evaluation of the sustainability of projects for the economic re-use of historical buildings in Venice. The model utilises the relevant parameters for the appraisal of sustainability, aggregated into three macro-indicators: intrinsic sustainability, context sustainability and economic-financial feasibility. The model has been calibrated by a panel of experts and tested on two reuse hypotheses of the Old Arsenal in Venice. The tests have proven the model to be a useful support in the early stages of evaluation of re-use projects, where economic improvements are to be combined with conservation, as it supports the identification of critical points and the selection of projects, thus providing not only a check-list of variables to be considered, but an appraisal of trade-offs between economic uses and requirements of conservation.Economic Reuse, Historical Building Conservation

Youth A Multicriteria Approach for the Evaluation of the Sustainability of Re-use of Historic Buildings in Venice

The paper presents a multiple criteria model for the evaluation of the sustainability of projects for the economic re-use of historical buildings in Venice. The model utilises the relevant parameters for the appraisal of sustainability, aggregated into three macroindicators: intrinsic sustainability, context sustainability and economic-financial feasibility. The model has been calibrated by a panel of experts and tested on two reuse hypothesis of the Old Arsenal in Venice.multiple criteria valuation, economic reuse, historical building conservation

Bisemivalues for bicooperative games

We introduce bisemivalues for bicooperative games and we also provide an interesting characterization of this kind of values by means of weighting coefficients in a similar way as it was given for semivalues in the context of cooperative games. Moreover, the notion of induced bisemivalues on lower cardinalities also makes sense and an adaptation of Dragan’s recurrence formula is obtained. For the particular case of (p, q)-bisemivalues, a computational procedure in terms of the multilinear extension of the game is given.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Games on lattices, multichoice games and the Shapley value: a new approach

Multichoice games have been introduced by Hsiao and Raghavan as a generalization of classical cooperative games. An important notion in cooperative game theory is the core of the game, as it contains the rational imputations for players. We propose two definitions for the core of a multichoice game, the first one is called the precore and is a direct generalization of the classical definition. We show that the precore coincides with the definition proposed by Faigle, and that it contains unbounded imputations, which makes its application questionable. A second definition is proposed, imposing normalization at each level, causing the core to be a convex closed set. We study its properties, introducing balancedness and marginal worth vectors, and defining the Weber set and the pre-Weber set. We show that the classical properties of inclusion of the (pre)core into the (pre)-Weber set as well as their equality remain valid. A last section makes a comparison with the core defined by van den Nouweland et al.multichoice game ; lattice ; core