@Article{rahwan07a,
  author =	 {Talal Rahwan and Nicholas R. Jennings},
  title =	 {An algorithm for distributing coalitional value
                  calculations among cooperating agents},
  journal =	 {Artificial Intelligence},
  year =	 2007,
  volume =	 171,
  number =	 {8--9},
  pages =	 {536--567},
  abstract =	 {The process of forming coalitions of software agents
                  generally requires calculating a value for every
                  possible coalition which indicates how beneficial
                  that coalition would be if it was formed. Now,
                  instead of having a single agent calculate all these
                  values (as is typically the case), it is more
                  efficient to distribute this calculation among the
                  agents, thus using all the computational resources
                  available to the system and avoiding the existence
                  of a single point of failure. Given this, we present
                  a novel algorithm for distributing this calculation
                  among agents in cooperative
                  environments. Specifically, by using our algorithm,
                  each agent is assigned some part of the calculation
                  such that the agents' shares are exhaustive and
                  disjoint. Moreover, the algorithm is decentralized,
                  requires no communication between the agents, has
                  minimal memory requirements, and can reflect
                  variations in the computational speeds of the
                  agents. To evaluate the effectiveness of our
                  algorithm, we compare it with the only other
                  algorithm available in the literature for
                  distributing the coalitional value calculations (due
                  to Shehory and Kraus). This shows that for the case
                  of 25 agents, the distribution process of our
                  algorithm took less than 0.02\% of the time, the
                  values were calculated using 0.000006\% of the
                  memory, the calculation redundancy was reduced from
                  383229848 to 0, and the total number of bytes sent
                  between the agents dropped from 1146989648 to 0
                  (note that for larger numbers of agents, these
                  improvements become exponentially better).},
  url = 	 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/rahwan07a.pdf},
  doi = 	 {10.1016/j.artint.2007.03.002},
  keywords = 	 {coalition negotiation}
}