Bundle Allocation with Conflicting Preferences Represented as Weighted Directed Acyclic Graphs - Application to Orbit Slot Ownership

Sara Maqrot, Stéphanie Roussel, Gauthier Picard, Cédric Pralet

Abstract: We introduce resource allocation techniques for a problem where (i) the agents express requests for obtaining item bundles as compact edge-weighted directed acyclic graphs (each path in such graphs is a bundle whose valuation is the sum of the weights of the traversed edges), and (ii) the agents do not bid on the exact same items but may bid on conflicting items, that cannot be both assigned. This setting is motivated by real applications such as Earth observation slot allocation, virtual network functions, or multi-agent path finding. We study several allocation techniques and analyze their performances on an orbit slot ownership allocation problem.