9,447 research outputs found
Efficient Energy Distribution in a Smart Grid using Multi-Player Games
Algorithms and models based on game theory have nowadays become prominent
techniques for the design of digital controllers for critical systems. Indeed,
such techniques enable automatic synthesis: given a model of the environment
and a property that the controller must enforce, those techniques automatically
produce a correct controller, when it exists. In the present paper, we consider
a class of concurrent, weighted, multi-player games that are well-suited to
model and study the interactions of several agents who are competing for some
measurable resources like energy. We prove that a subclass of those games
always admit a Nash equilibrium, i.e. a situation in which all players play in
such a way that they have no incentive to deviate. Moreover, the strategies
yielding those Nash equilibria have a special structure: when one of the agents
deviate from the equilibrium, all the others form a coalition that will enforce
a retaliation mechanism that punishes the deviant agent. We apply those results
to a real-life case study in which several smart houses that produce their own
energy with solar panels, and can share this energy among them in micro-grid,
must distribute the use of this energy along the day in order to avoid
consuming electricity that must be bought from the global grid. We demonstrate
that our theory allows one to synthesise an efficient controller for these
houses: using penalties to be paid in the utility bill as an incentive, we
force the houses to follow a pre-computed schedule that maximises the
proportion of the locally produced energy that is consumed.Comment: In Proceedings Cassting'16/SynCoP'16, arXiv:1608.0017
Thin Games with Symmetry and Concurrent Hyland-Ong Games
We build a cartesian closed category, called Cho, based on event structures.
It allows an interpretation of higher-order stateful concurrent programs that
is refined and precise: on the one hand it is conservative with respect to
standard Hyland-Ong games when interpreting purely functional programs as
innocent strategies, while on the other hand it is much more expressive. The
interpretation of programs constructs compositionally a representation of their
execution that exhibits causal dependencies and remembers the points of
non-deterministic branching.The construction is in two stages. First, we build
a compact closed category Tcg. It is a variant of Rideau and Winskel's category
CG, with the difference that games and strategies in Tcg are equipped with
symmetry to express that certain events are essentially the same. This is
analogous to the underlying category of AJM games enriching simple games with
an equivalence relations on plays. Building on this category, we construct the
cartesian closed category Cho as having as objects the standard arenas of
Hyland-Ong games, with strategies, represented by certain events structures,
playing on games with symmetry obtained as expanded forms of these arenas.To
illustrate and give an operational light on these constructions, we interpret
(a close variant of) Idealized Parallel Algol in Cho
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