Min‐k‐Cut Coalition Structure Generation on Trust‐Utility Relationship Graph

Trust relationships have an important effect on coalition formation. In many real scenarios, agents usually cooperate with others in their trusted social networks to form coalitions. Therefore, the trust value between agents should constrain the utility of forming coalitions when cooperating. At the same time, most studies ignore the impact of the number of coalitions in coalition structure. In this paper, the coalition formation of trust-utility relationship in social networks is researched. Each node represents an agent, and the trust-utility networks that connect the agents constrain coalition formation. To solve the task assignment problem, this paper proposes a greedy algorithm which is based on the edge contraction. Under the premise of ensuring the agent’s individually rationality, this algorithm simulates the formation process of coalitions between agents through continuous edge contraction and constrains the number of forming coalitions to k to solve the problem of coalition structure. Finally, the simulation results show that our algorithm has great scalability because of the ability of solving the coalition structure on a large-scale agent set. It can meet the growing demand for data intensive applications in the Internet of things and artificial intelligence era. The quality of the solution is much higher than other algorithms, and the running time is negligible.