Assigning tasks to agents under time conflicts: a parameterized complexity approach

Abstract: We consider the problem of assigning tasks to agents under time conflicts, with applications also to frequency allocations in point-to-point wireless networks. In particular, we are given a set $V$ of $n$ agents, a set $E$ of $m$ tasks, and $k$ different time slots. Each task can be carried out in one of the $k$ predefined time slots, and can be represented by the subset $e\subseteq E$ of the involved agents. Since each agent cannot participate to more than one task simultaneously, we must find an allocation that assigns non-overlapping tasks to each time slot. Being the number of slots limited by $k$, in general it is not possible to executed all the possible tasks, and our aim is to determine a solution maximizing the overall social welfare, that is the number of executed tasks. We focus on the restriction of this problem in which the number of time slots is fixed to be $k=2$, and each task is performed by exactly two agents, that is $|e|=2$. In fact, even under this assumptions, the problem is still challenging, as it remains computationally difficult. We provide parameterized complexity results with respect to several reasonable parameters, showing for the different cases that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable or it is paraNP-hard.