An approach to robustness in the Stable Roommates problem and its comparison with the Stable Marriage problem

Abstract

Recently a robustness notion for matching problems based on the concept of a (a, b)-supermatch is proposed for the Stable Marriage problem (SM). In this paper we extend this notion to another matching problem, namely the Stable Roommates problem (SR). We define a polynomial-time procedure based on the concept of reduced rotation poset to verify if a stable matching is a (1, b)-supermatch. Then, we adapt a local search and a genetic local search procedure to find the (1, b)-supermatch that minimises b in a given SR instance. Finally, we compare the two models and also create different SM and SR instances to present empirical results on the robustness of these instances.