Allocation in Practice

How do we allocate scarcere sources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.Comment: To appear in Proc. of 37th edition of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2014), Springer LNC

New techniques for cost sharing in combinatorial optimization games

Combinatorial optimization games form an important subclass of cooperative games. In recent years, increased attention has been given to the issue of finding good cost shares for such games. In this paper, we define a very general class of games, called integer minimization games, which includes the combinatorial optimization games in the literature as special cases. We then present new techniques, based on row and column generation, for computing good cost shares for these games. To illustrate the power of these techniques, we apply them to traveling salesman and vehicle routing games. Our results generalize and unify several results in the literature. The main underlying idea is that suitable valid inequalities for the associated combinatorial optimization problems can be used to derive improved cost shares