Modular mobile manipulators coalition formation through distributed transportation tasks allocation

The use of mobile manipulators for transportation tasks has provided solutions to several flexibility problems in manufacturing systems. Mobile manipulators are mobile entities equipped with robotic arm for loading and unloading of parts and an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) for their transport. In order to increase further the flexibility of these systems, the mobile manipulators could be modular, where their two entities are able to work together or separately. The assignment of transportation operations to different smart entities working together is a complex problem, which has not been addressed sufficiently in the literature. This paper proposes a two-stage decision approach for transportation task assignment, which is based on auction mechanism and a coalition formation process modeled with integer linear programming. A real use case has been implemented to test the efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed approach gives promising results that are discussed.

Czech Republic

With only a few exceptions, Czech cabinets have been coalition cabinets. Two essential features of coalition politics in the Czech Republic are unstable majorities and ideological heterogeneity inside governing coalitions. Only very rarely have there been pre-electoral cooperation, and a threshold for alliances in the electoral system has meant a substantial obstacle for smaller parties. There has been no pre-electoral cooperation, such as pre-electoral coalitions with a mutual commitment to form a joint government after the elections. Instead, cabinet-building usually has been a long process, on average much longer than in the other new European Union (EU) member states. The largest parties have relied on cooperation with small centre-right parties. Another critical and typical feature of the Czech coalition formation process are strong presidential interventions. This has been practised by all presidents, starting with Vaclav Havel, continuing with Vaclav Klaus, and the current president Milos Zeman. Coalition agreements, mostly in a written form, have been crucial. Political parties have found it difficult to cooperate without such agreements. In general, the character and composition of the agreements have very much been policy-oriented. However, there have also existed unwritten rules and informal structures which have undermined coalition governance because they have established inequality among formally equal ministers. While originally tilted towards Prime Minister Dominance, because of presidential involvement, the governance system for intra-cabinet relations has become one that alternates between the coalition compromise model and the ministerial government model.

Bulgaria

Democracy in Bulgaria came as a result of a pact that preserved the role of the communist successor party to a larger degree than in many other post-communist countries in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). That had an impact on the nature of coalition government as well as an important but rarely noted aspect of the legacy of the successor party, the Bulgarian Socialist party (BSP). Because of the dominant position of the BSP, its personalized and centralized vision and practice of governing have remained characteristic of the political system. Coalition government is the dominant pattern in Bulgarian democratic politics: of the eleven party-based cabinets since 1990, only four were single-party ones. There are several major features of coalition government in Bulgaria: one is that party-building and coalition-making have been deeply intertwined over the entire period. Further, coalitions have been based on the understanding that parties divide the power and accompanying privileges, rather than that they share responsibility for government. Thus, in contrast to some longer-standing democracies the coalition formation process rarely involves detailed agreements on policy, and has mostly revolved around personalities and portfolios. As a result, coalition agreements have been minimal and the periods of coalition bargaining have been relatively short. Conflict resolution mechanisms are centralized and personalized, and coalitions have broken down because of narrow party political interests rather than because of principled conflicts over public policy.

Law Clerks

Law clerks are central to the judicial process. Yet questions persist about whether they exercise undue influence. Clerkships are prestigious and clerk selection is driven by increasing competition. Hired for a single year, clerks take on considerable responsibility. At the agenda-setting stage, clerks screen incoming cases to help judges determine those that are worthy of review. Law clerks do research, prepare their judges for oral argument, and suggest how cases ought to be decided. Clerks take part in opinion writing by drafting the initial opinions that explain their judges’ positions. Clerks assist judges in the coalition formation process by discussing the cases and negotiating with other clerks. Post-clerkship career paths can not only be lucrative but also provide opportunities for former clerks to continue to influence their former bosses. Ultimately, research shows that while clerks necessarily influence the judicial decision-making process, they have not usurped judicial authority.

The Centre Does Not Hold: Coalition Politics and Party System Change in the Netherlands, 2002–12

Like many party systems across Western Europe, the Dutch party system has been in flux since 2002 as a result of a series of related developments, including the decline of mainstream parties which coincided with the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties and the concurrent dimensional transformation of the political space. This article analyses how these challenges to mainstream parties fundamentally affected the structure of party competition. On the basis of content analysis of party programmes, we examine the changing configuration of the Dutch party space since 2002 and investigate the impact of these changes on coalition-formation patterns. We conclude that the Dutch party system has become increasingly unstable. It has gradually lost its core through electoral fragmentation and mainstream parties’ positional shifts. The disappearance of a core party that dominates the coalition-formation process initially transformed the direction of party competition from centripetal to centrifugal. However, since 2012 a theoretically novel configuration has emerged in which no party or coherent group of parties dominates competition.

One size fits all? The role of size in coalition formation and portfolio allocation after the local elections of 2006 in the Flemish region in Belgium

This paper focuses on the role of size in coalition formation in the Flemish region in Belgium after the local elections of 2006. A quantitative analysis already showed that size matters at the local level. In this paper, portfolio allocation is considered as an important part of coalition formation. This paper illustrates that combining research methods can enhance our knowledge about the role of size in the coalition formation process. The results demonstrate that parties consider a minimal winning and minimum parties coalition as a starting point for the negotiations and other factors influence the final coalition outcome. In portfolio allocation proportionality rules, but parties also prefer competences related to their policy profile. Intra-party and personal characteristics play an important role in selecting the executive mandates.

Cooperative Games with Overlapping Coalitions

In the usual models of cooperative game theory, the outcome of a coalition formation process is either the grand coalition or a coalition structure that consists of disjoint coalitions. However, in many domains where coalitions are associated with tasks, an agent may be involved in executing more than one task, and thus may distribute his resources among several coalitions. To tackle such scenarios, we introduce a model for cooperative games with overlapping coalitions—or overlapping coalition formation (OCF) games. We then explore the issue of stability in this setting. In particular, we introduce a notion of the core, which generalizes the corresponding notion in the traditional (non-overlapping) scenario. Then, under some quite general conditions, we characterize the elements of the core, and show that any element of the core maximizes the social welfare. We also introduce a concept of balancedness for overlapping coalitional games, and use it to characterize coalition structures that can be extended to elements of the core. Finally, we generalize the notion of convexity to our setting, and show that under some natural assumptions convex games have a non-empty core. Moreover, we introduce two alternative notions of stability in OCF that allow a wider range of deviations, and explore the relationships among the corresponding definitions of the core, as well as the classic (non-overlapping) core and the Aubin core. We illustrate the general properties of the three cores, and also study them from a computational perspective, thus obtaining additional insights into their fundamental structure.