Allocation in Practice
This work addresses practical allocation challenges for social startups and large companies, but appears incremental as it builds on existing fair division literature with new dimensions.
The paper tackles fair division problems in resource and cost allocation, applying them to real-world scenarios like optimizing food distribution for charities and cost allocation in a multinational company's network, but does not report specific numerical results.
How do we allocate scarcere sources? 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.