1. Nash balanced assignment problem
- Author
-
Nguyen, Minh Hieu, Baiou, Mourad, Nguyen, Viet Hung, Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Modélisation et d'Optimisation des Systèmes (LIMOS), Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de St Etienne (ENSM ST-ETIENNE)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA)-Institut national polytechnique Clermont Auvergne (INP Clermont Auvergne), Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA)-Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA), INSA Lyon, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de St Etienne-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA)-Institut national polytechnique Clermont Auvergne (INP Clermont Auvergne), Sciencesconf.org, CCSD, and NGUYEN, Minh Hieu
- Subjects
TheoryofComputation_MISCELLANEOUS ,computational complexity ,[INFO.INFO-RO] Computer Science [cs]/Operations Research [cs.RO] ,matching problem ,Proportional fairness ,Proportional-fair scheduling ,TheoryofComputation_GENERAL ,[INFO.INFO-RO]Computer Science [cs]/Operations Research [cs.RO] ,[MATH.MATH-CO] Mathematics [math]/Combinatorics [math.CO] ,[MATH.MATH-CO]Mathematics [math]/Combinatorics [math.CO] ,combinatorial optimization ,balanced assignment problem ,ComputingMilieux_MISCELLANEOUS ,Nash fairness ,Weighted Sum Method - Abstract
International audience; In this paper, we consider a variant of the classic Assignment Problem (AP), called the Balanced Assignment Problem (BAP) [2]. The BAP seeks to find an assignment solution which has the smallest value of max-min distance: the difference between the maximum assignment cost and the minimum one. However, by minimizing only the max-min distance, the total cost of the BAP solution is neglected and it may lead to a very inefficient solution in terms of total cost. Hence, we propose a fair way based on Nash equilibrium [1] [3], [4] to inject the total cost into the objective function of the BAP for finding assignment solutions having a better trade-off between the two objectives: the first aims at minimizing the total cost and the second aims at minimizing the max-min distance. For this purpose, we introduce the concept of Nash Fairness (NF) solutions based on the definition of proportional-fair scheduling adapted in the context of the AP: a transfer of utilities between the total cost and the max-min distance is considered to be fair if the percentage increase in the total cost is smaller than the percentage decrease in the max-min distance and vice versa. We first show the existence of a NF solution for the AP which is exactly the optimal solution minimizing the product of the total cost and the max-min distance. However, finding such a solution may be difficult as it requires to minimize a concave function. The main result of this paper is to show that finding all NF solutions can be done in polynomial time. For that, we propose a Newton-based iterative algorithm converging to NF solutions in polynomial time. It consists in optimizing a sequence of linear combinations of the two objective based on Weighted Sum Method [5]. Computational results on various instances of the AP are presented and commented.
- Published
- 2022