Payoff Distribution in Robust Coalitional Games on Time-Varying Networks

In this article, we consider a sequence of transferable utility coalitional games, where the actual coalitional values are unknown but vary within known bounds. As a solution to the resulting family of games, we formalize the notion of “robust core.” Our main contribution is to design two distributed algorithms, namely 1) distributed payoff allocation and 2) distributed bargaining, which converge to a consensual payoff distribution in the robust core. We adopt an operator-theoretic perspective to show convergence of both algorithms executed on time-varying communication networks. An energy storage optimization application motivates our framework for “robust coalitional games.”