Evolutionary solving of the debts' clearing problem
This addresses a computational optimization problem for groups like persons or companies, but it is incremental as it applies a standard AI technique to a known problem.
The paper tackles the NP-hard debts' clearing problem by proposing an evolutionary algorithm to find near-optimal solutions with minimal transaction operations for large inputs, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
The debts' clearing problem is about clearing all the debts in a group of n entities (persons, companies etc.) using a minimal number of money transaction operations. The problem is known to be NP-hard in the strong sense. As for many intractable problems, techniques from the field of artificial intelligence are useful in finding solutions close to optimum for large inputs. An evolutionary algorithm for solving the debts' clearing problem is proposed.