Towards More Realistic Models for Refugee Integration: Anonymous Refugee Housing with Upper-Bounds

TL;DR

This paper refines a refugee housing model by introducing a more practical variant that addresses computational complexity and preference continuity issues, aiming for more realistic and implementable solutions.

Contribution

It proposes a restricted, more practical model for refugee housing and analyzes its computational complexity, improving applicability over previous models.

Findings

The new model is computationally more tractable.

It better reflects real-world refugee housing preferences.

The study highlights the importance of preference continuity.

Abstract

[Knop and Schierreich; AAMAS~'23] recently introduced a novel model for refugee housing, where we are given a city's topology represented as a graph, a set of inhabitants who occupy some vertices of the topology, and a set of refugees that we need to house in unoccupied vertices. Moreover, each inhabitant approves specific numbers of refugees in his neighbourhood, and our goal is to find housing such that every inhabitant approves the number of refugees housed in his neighbourhood. However, such a model suffers from several problems: (i) it is computationally hard to find desirable housing, and (ii) the inhabitants' preferences are not necessarily continuous, which hardly occurs in practice. To avoid these objections, we introduce a restricted variant of the problem that is more closely aligned with practical scenarios of refugee housing and study its complexity.