Knowledge-Based Stable Roommates Problem: A Real-World Application
This work addresses the problem of improving roommate assignments for students by moving beyond domain-independent fairness criteria to include real-world preferences, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing SRTI frameworks.
The paper tackles the Stable Roommates problem with Ties and Incomplete lists (SRTI) by introducing a knowledge-based method that incorporates domain-specific criteria, such as habits and desires, for real-world applications like assigning students to dormitories, and investigates its practical use in a university setting.
The Stable Roommates problem with Ties and Incomplete lists (SRTI) is a matching problem characterized by the preferences of agents over other agents as roommates, where the preferences may have ties or be incomplete. SRTI asks for a matching that is stable and, sometimes, optimizes a domain-independent fairness criterion (e.g., Egalitarian). However, in real-world applications (e.g., assigning students as roommates at a dormitory), we usually consider a variety of domain-specific criteria depending on preferences over the habits and desires of the agents. With this motivation, we introduce a knowledge-based method to SRTI considering domain-specific knowledge, and investigate its real-world application for assigning students as roommates at a university dormitory. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).