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Article
A Fair Assignment Algorithm for Multiple Preference Queries
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
  • Leong Hou U, University of Hong Kong
  • Nikos Mamoulis, University of Hong Kong
  • Kyriakos Mouratidis, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
8-2009
Abstract

Consider an internship assignment system, where at the end of each academic year, interested university students search and apply for available positions, based on their preferences (e.g., nature of the job, salary, office location, etc). In a variety of facility, task or position assignment contexts, users have personal preferences expressed by different weights on the attributes of the searched objects. Although individual preference queries can be evaluated by selecting the object in the database with the highest aggregate score, in the case of multiple simultaneous requests, a single object cannot be assigned to more than one users. The challenge is to compute a fair 1-1 matching between the queries and the objects. We model this as a stable-marriage problem and propose an efficient method for its processing. Our algorithm iteratively finds stable query-object pairs and removes them from the problem. At its core lies a novel skyline maintenance technique, which we prove to be I/O optimal. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation using real and synthetic data, which demonstrates that our approach outperforms adaptations of previous methods by several orders of magnitude.

Keywords
  • Internship assignment,
  • multiple simultaneous requests,
  • database management,
  • algorithms
Identifier
10.14778/1687627.1687746
Publisher
ACM
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://dx.doi.org/10.14778/1687627.1687746
Citation Information
Leong Hou U, Nikos Mamoulis and Kyriakos Mouratidis. "A Fair Assignment Algorithm for Multiple Preference Queries" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment Vol. 2 Iss. 1 (2009) p. 1054 - 1065 ISSN: 2150-8097
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kyriakos_mouratidis/17/