Utility Distribution Strategy of the Task Agents in Coalition Skill Games

Abstract

This paper focuses on the rational distribution of task utilities in coalition skill games, which is a restricted form of coalition game, where each service agent has a set of skills and each task agent needs a set of skills in order to be completed. These two types of agents are assumed to be self-interested. Given the task selection strategy of service agents, the utility distribution strategies of task agents play an important role in improving their individual revenues and system total revenue. The problem that needs to be resolved is how to design the task selection strategies of the service agents and the utility distribution strategies of the task agents to make the self-interested decisions improve the system whole performance. However, to the best of our knowledge, this problem has been the topic of very few studies and has not been properly addressed. To address this problem, a task allocation algorithm for self-interested agents in a coalition skill game is proposed, it distributes the utilities of tasks to the needed skills according to the powers of the service agents that possess the corresponding skills. The final simulation results verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.