Egalitarian Utilities Divide-and-Coordinate: Stop arguing about decisions, let's share rewards!

In this paper we formulate a novel Divide-and-Coordinate (DaC) algorithm, the so-called Egalitarian Utilities Divide-and-Coordinate (EU-DaC) algorithm. The Divide-and-Coordinate (DaC) framework [3] is a family of bounded DCOP algorithms that solve DCOPs by exploiting the concept of agreement. The intuition behind EU-DaC is that agents get closer to an agreement, on the optimal solution, when they communicate the local max-marginals utilities for their assignments instead of only their preferred assignments. We provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis as well as illustrating the competitiveness of EU-DaC.