{"title":"Fair distribution of delivery orders","authors":"Hadi Hosseini , Shivika Narang , Tomasz Wąs","doi":"10.1016/j.artint.2025.104389","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We initiate the study of fair distribution of delivery tasks among a set of agents wherein delivery jobs are placed along the vertices of a graph. Our goal is to fairly distribute delivery costs (distance traveled to complete the deliveries) among a fixed set of agents while satisfying some desirable notions of economic efficiency. We adopt well-established fairness concepts—such as <em>envy-freeness up to one item</em> (EF1) and <em>minimax share</em> (MMS)—to our setting and show that fairness is often incompatible with the efficiency notion of <em>social optimality</em>. We then characterize instances that admit fair and socially optimal solutions by exploiting graph structures. We further show that achieving fairness along with Pareto optimality is computationally intractable. We complement this by designing an XP algorithm (parameterized by the number of agents) for finding MMS and Pareto optimal solutions on every tree instance, and show that the same algorithm can be modified to find efficient solutions along with EF1, when such solutions exist. The latter crucially relies on an intriguing result that in our setting EF1 and Pareto optimality jointly imply MMS. We conclude by theoretically and experimentally analyzing the price of fairness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":8434,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence","volume":"347 ","pages":"Article 104389"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1000,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Artificial Intelligence","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370225001080","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
We initiate the study of fair distribution of delivery tasks among a set of agents wherein delivery jobs are placed along the vertices of a graph. Our goal is to fairly distribute delivery costs (distance traveled to complete the deliveries) among a fixed set of agents while satisfying some desirable notions of economic efficiency. We adopt well-established fairness concepts—such as envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and minimax share (MMS)—to our setting and show that fairness is often incompatible with the efficiency notion of social optimality. We then characterize instances that admit fair and socially optimal solutions by exploiting graph structures. We further show that achieving fairness along with Pareto optimality is computationally intractable. We complement this by designing an XP algorithm (parameterized by the number of agents) for finding MMS and Pareto optimal solutions on every tree instance, and show that the same algorithm can be modified to find efficient solutions along with EF1, when such solutions exist. The latter crucially relies on an intriguing result that in our setting EF1 and Pareto optimality jointly imply MMS. We conclude by theoretically and experimentally analyzing the price of fairness.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Artificial Intelligence (AIJ) welcomes papers covering a broad spectrum of AI topics, including cognition, automated reasoning, computer vision, machine learning, and more. Papers should demonstrate advancements in AI and propose innovative approaches to AI problems. Additionally, the journal accepts papers describing AI applications, focusing on how new methods enhance performance rather than reiterating conventional approaches. In addition to regular papers, AIJ also accepts Research Notes, Research Field Reviews, Position Papers, Book Reviews, and summary papers on AI challenges and competitions.