Multi-agent network games with applications in smart electric mobility

The growing complexity and globalization of modern society brought to light novel problems and challenges for researchers that aim to model real-life phenomena. Nowadays communities and even single individuals cannot be considered as a closed system, since one's actions create a ripple effect that ends up influencing the action of others. Therefore, the study of decision-making processes over networks became a pivotal topic in the research community. The possible applications are virtually endless and span into many different fields. Two of the most relevant examples are smart mobility and energy management in highly populated cities, where a collection of (partially) noncooperative individuals interact over a network trying to reach an efficient equilibrium point, in the sense of Nash, and share limited resources due to the environment in which they operate. In this work, we approach these problems through the lens of game theory. We use different declinations of this powerful mathematical tool to study several aspects of these themes. We design decentralized iterative algorithms solving generalized network games that generate behavioral rules for the players that, if followed, ensure global convergence. Then, we question the classical assumption of perfect players’ rationality by introducing novel dynamics to model partial rationality and analyzing their properties. We conclude by focusing on the design of optimal policies to regulate smart mobility and energy management. In this case, we create a detailed and more realistic description of the problem and use a nudging mechanism, implemented by means of a semi-decentralized algorithm, to align the users' behavior with the one desired by the policymaker

An asynchronous distributed and scalable generalized Nash equilibrium seeking algorithm for strongly monotone games

In this paper, we present three distributed algorithms to solve a class of Generalized Nash Equilibrium (GNE) seeking problems in strongly monotone games. The first one (SD-GENO) is based on synchronous updates of the agents, while the second and the third (AD-GEED and AD-GENO) represent asynchronous solutions that are robust to communication delays. AD-GENO can be seen as a refinement of AD-GEED, since it only requires node auxiliary variables, enhancing the scalability of the algorithm. Our main contribution is to prove convergence to a v-GNE variational-GNE (vGNE) of the game via an operator-theoretic approach. Finally, we apply the algorithms to network Cournot games and show how different activation sequences and delays affect convergence. We also compare the proposed algorithms to a state-of-the-art algorithm solving a similar problem, and observe that AD-GENO outperforms it.</p

Gradient Dynamics in Linear Quadratic Network Games with Time-Varying Connectivity and Population Fluctuation

In this paper, we consider a learning problem among non-cooperative agents interacting in a time-varying system. Specifically, we focus on repeated linear quadratic network games, in which the network of interactions changes with time and agents may not be present at each iteration. To get tractability, we assume that at each iteration, the network of interactions is sampled from an underlying random network model and agents participate at random with a given probability. Under these assumptions, we consider a gradient-based learning algorithm and establish almost sure convergence of the agents' strategies to the Nash equilibrium of the game played over the expected network. Additionally, we prove, in the large population regime, that the learned strategy is an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium for each stage game with high probability. We validate our results over an online market application.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Extended version of the original paper to appear in the proceedings of the 2023 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC