Budgeted personalized incentive approaches for smoothing congestion in resource networks

• Main Authors: VARAKANTHAM, Pradeep, FU, Na, YEOH, William, CHENG, Shih-Fen, LAU, Hoong Chuin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1888; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2887/viewcontent/ADT_Camera.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Congestion occurs when there is competition for resources by sel sh agents. In this paper, we are concerned with smoothing out congestion in a network of resources by using personalized well-timed in- centives that are subject to budget constraints. To that end, we provide: (i) a mathematical formulation that computes equilibrium for the re- source sharing congestion game with incentives and budget constraints; (ii) an integrated approach that scales to larger problems by exploiting the factored network structure and approximating the attained equilib- rium; (iii) an iterative best response algorithm for solving the uncon- strained version (no budget) of the resource sharing congestion game; and (iv) theoretical and empirical results (on an illustrative theme park problem) that demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.