Abstract
How do we allocate scarce resources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.
The work described here is joint with many colleagues including: Martin Aleksandrov, Haris Aziz, Casey Cahan, Charles Grettom, Phil Kilby, Nick Mattei. NICTA is supported by the Australian Government through the Department of Communications and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence Program. The author receives support from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research via the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
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Walsh, T. (2014). Allocation in Practice. In: Lutz, C., Thielscher, M. (eds) KI 2014: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8736. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11206-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11206-0_2
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