Knowledge Based Approach to OOTW Coalition Formation

The task of planning humanitarian relief operations within a high number of hardly collaborating and vaguely linked non-governmental organizations is a challenging problem. We suggest an alternative knowledge based approach to the coalition formation problem for humanitarian and peace-keeping missions. Owing to the very special nature of this domain, where the agents representing individual organisations may eventually agree to collaborate, but are very often reluctant to share their knowledge and resources, we tried to reduce the problem complexity by splitting the community of agents into alliances. We combined classical negotiation mechanisms with the acquaintance models and social knowledge techniques in order to reduce the communication traffic and to keep the privacy of knowledge. Experimental results are discussed in the paper.