3,886 research outputs found
Interdependent Scheduling Games
We propose a model of interdependent scheduling games in which each player
controls a set of services that they schedule independently. A player is free
to schedule his own services at any time; however, each of these services only
begins to accrue reward for the player when all predecessor services, which may
or may not be controlled by the same player, have been activated. This model,
where players have interdependent services, is motivated by the problems faced
in planning and coordinating large-scale infrastructures, e.g., restoring
electricity and gas to residents after a natural disaster or providing medical
care in a crisis when different agencies are responsible for the delivery of
staff, equipment, and medicine. We undertake a game-theoretic analysis of this
setting and in particular consider the issues of welfare maximization,
computing best responses, Nash dynamics, and existence and computation of Nash
equilibria.Comment: Accepted to IJCAI 201
Transforming Energy Networks via Peer to Peer Energy Trading: Potential of Game Theoretic Approaches
Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has emerged as a next-generation energy
management mechanism for the smart grid that enables each prosumer of the
network to participate in energy trading with one another and the grid. This
poses a significant challenge in terms of modeling the decision-making process
of each participant with conflicting interest and motivating prosumers to
participate in energy trading and to cooperate, if necessary, for achieving
different energy management goals. Therefore, such decision-making process
needs to be built on solid mathematical and signal processing tools that can
ensure an efficient operation of the smart grid. This paper provides an
overview of the use of game theoretic approaches for P2P energy trading as a
feasible and effective means of energy management. As such, we discuss various
games and auction theoretic approaches by following a systematic classification
to provide information on the importance of game theory for smart energy
research. Then, the paper focuses on the P2P energy trading describing its key
features and giving an introduction to an existing P2P testbed. Further, the
paper zooms into the detail of some specific game and auction theoretic models
that have recently been used in P2P energy trading and discusses some important
finding of these schemes.Comment: 38 pages, single column, double spac
Decentralized Convergence to Nash Equilibria in Constrained Deterministic Mean Field Control
This paper considers decentralized control and optimization methodologies for
large populations of systems, consisting of several agents with different
individual behaviors, constraints and interests, and affected by the aggregate
behavior of the overall population. For such large-scale systems, the theory of
aggregative and mean field games has been established and successfully applied
in various scientific disciplines. While the existing literature addresses the
case of unconstrained agents, we formulate deterministic mean field control
problems in the presence of heterogeneous convex constraints for the individual
agents, for instance arising from agents with linear dynamics subject to convex
state and control constraints. We propose several model-free feedback
iterations to compute in a decentralized fashion a mean field Nash equilibrium
in the limit of infinite population size. We apply our methods to the
constrained linear quadratic deterministic mean field control problem and to
the constrained mean field charging control problem for large populations of
plug-in electric vehicles.Comment: IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control (cond. accepted
Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management
Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our system to a real-world problem faced by British Telecom
A privacy-friendly game-theoretic distributed scheduling system for domestic appliances
open3Game-theoretic Demand Side Management (DSM)
systems have been investigated as a decentralized approach for
the collaborative scheduling of the usage of domestic electrical
appliances within a set of households. Such systems allow for the
shifting of the starting time of deferrable devices according to
the current energy price or power grid condition, in order to
reduce the individual monthly bill or to adjust the power load
experienced by the grid while meeting the users’ preferences
about the time of use. The drawback of DSM distributed
protocols is that they require each user to communicate his/her
own energy consumption patterns to the other users, which may
leak sensitive information regarding private habits.
This paper proposes a distributed Privacy-Friendly DSM
system which preserves users’ privacy by integrating data aggregation
and perturbation techniques: users decide their schedule
according to aggregated consumption measurements perturbed
by means of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). We
evaluate the noise power and the size of the set of users required
to achieve a given privacy level, quantified by means of the
Kullback-Leibler divergence. The performance of our proposed
DSM system are compared to the ones obtained by a benchmark
system which does not support privacy preservation in terms of
social cost, peak demand and convergence time. Results show
that privacy can be preserved at the cost of increasing the peak
demand and the number of game iterations, whereas social cost
is only marginally incremented.C Rottondi; A Barbato; G VerticaleRottondi, CRISTINA EMMA MARGHERITA; Barbato, Antimo; Verticale, Giacom
Preliminary specification and design documentation for software components to achieve catallaxy in computational systems
This Report is about the preliminary specifications and design documentation for software components to achieve Catallaxy in computational systems. -- Die Arbeit beschreibt die Spezifikation und das Design von Softwarekomponenten, um das Konzept der Katallaxie in Grid Systemen umzusetzen. Eine EinfĂĽhrung ordnet das Konzept der Katallaxie in bestehende Grid Taxonomien ein und stellt grundlegende Komponenten vor. AnschlieĂźend werden diese Komponenten auf ihre Anwendbarkeit in bestehenden Application Layer Netzwerken untersucht.Grid Computing
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