Cooperative Control and Potential Games

We present a view of cooperative control using the language of learning in games. We review the game-theoretic concepts of potential and weakly acyclic games, and demonstrate how several cooperative control problems, such as consensus and dynamic sensor coverage, can be formulated in these settings. Motivated by this connection, we build upon game-theoretic concepts to better accommodate a broader class of cooperative control problems. In particular, we extend existing learning algorithms to accommodate restricted action sets caused by the limitations of agent capabilities and group based decision making. Furthermore, we also introduce a new class of games called sometimes weakly acyclic games for time-varying objective functions and action sets, and provide distributed algorithms for convergence to an equilibrium

Reducing Power Losses in Smart Grids with Cooperative Game Theory

In a theoretical framework of game theory, one can distinguish between the noncooperative and the cooperative game theory. While the theory of noncooperative games is about modeling competitive behavior, cooperative game theory is dedicated to the study of cooperation among a number of players. The cooperative game theory includes mostly two branches: the Nash negotiation and the coalitional game theory. In this chapter, we restrict our attention to the latter. In recent years, the concept of efficient management of electric power has become more complex as a result of the high integration of distributed energy resources in the scenarios to be considered, mainly distributed generation, energy storage distributed, and demand management. This situation has been accentuated with the appearance of new consumption elements, such as electric vehicles, which could cause a high impact on distribution gridworks if they are not managed properly. This chapter presents an innovative approach toward an efficient energy model through the application of the theory of cooperative games with transferable utility in which the management, capacity, and control of distributed energy resources are integrated to provide optimal energy solutions that allow achieving significant savings in associated costs. This chapter presents a general description of the potential of the application of the theory to address Smart Grid, providing a systematic treatment

A Comprehensive Survey of Potential Game Approaches to Wireless Networks

Potential games form a class of non-cooperative games where unilateral improvement dynamics are guaranteed to converge in many practical cases. The potential game approach has been applied to a wide range of wireless network problems, particularly to a variety of channel assignment problems. In this paper, the properties of potential games are introduced, and games in wireless networks that have been proven to be potential games are comprehensively discussed.Comment: 44 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E98-B, no. 9, Sept. 201