Coalition Structure Generation with Given Required Bound Based on Cardinality Structure

Coalition formation is a key topic in multi-agent systems. One may prefer a coalition structure that maximizes the sum of the values of the coalitions, but often the number of coalition structures is too large to allow exhaustive search for the optimal one. Furthermore, finding the optimal coalition structure is NP-hard. Thus emerges the meaningful problem: when practical applications can present required real bound on the worst case, and how to attain this demand via partial search? This paper reports on a novel algorithm based on cardinality structure: the bound K≥2 can be attained with searching of those coalition structures whose cardinality structure is in the CCS(n, K). Finally, experiments indicates the new algorithm is obviously better than existing algorithms.