Fair Robust Assignment Using Redundancy
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We study the consideration of fairness in redundant assignment for multi-agent task allocation. It has recently been shown that redundant assignment of agents to tasks provides robustness to uncertainty in task performance. However, the question of how to fairly assign these redundant resources across tasks remains unaddressed. In this paper, we present a novel problem formulation for fair redundant task allocation, in which we cast it as the optimization of worst-case task costs. Solving this problem optimally is NP-hard. Therefore, we exploit properties of supermodularity to propose a polynomial-time, near-optimal solution. Our algorithm provides a solution set that is α times larger than the optimal set size in order to guarantee a solution cost at least as good as the optimal target cost. We derive the sub- optimality bound on this cardinality relaxation, α. Additionally, we demonstrate that our algorithm performs near-optimally without the cardinality relaxation. We show the algorithm in simulations of redundant assignments of robots to goal nodes on transport networks with uncertain travel times. Empirically, our algorithm outperforms benchmarks, scales to large problems, and provides improvements in both fairness and average utility.
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2377-3766