Hypergraph conflict analysis (Q2277381)

A hypergraph is known to be a set of subsets of a given set; conflicts may be approached by way of hypergraph analysis, starting from \(H=^{\Delta}\{A,B,\psi \}\), where A is a set of agents, B a set of options and \(\psi\) a non-empty subset of \({\mathfrak P}(B)\setminus \{\emptyset \}\), the set of choice sets. \(E_ i\in B\) is in fact the set of options acceptable to agent \(a_ i.\) From this approach several useful analytical tools can be derived: (1) the definition of the degree of conflict, \(\nu\) ; \(\nu =0\) means absence of conflict; under certain assumptions upper and lower bounds can be derived; (2) the transversal number, \(\tau\), the minimal number of options needed to satisfy all agents; \(\tau =1\) means again absence of conflict. The analysis can be generalized to fuzzy hypergraphs, still the 3-tuple H defined above, but now \(\psi\) consists of non-empty fuzzy subsets of B; degree of conflict, \(\nu\), and transversal number, \(\tau\), are also generalizable. A further generalization is the extension to continuous spaces, useful in the analysis of certain negotiation situations; as multicriteria analysis provides an appropriate solution concept, an existing flexible multicriteria method, further developed by one of the authors, QUALIFLEX, has been provided with a continuous version, for which a convergence property has been derived.