Mean-Field-Type Games in Engineering

A mean-field-type game is a game in which the instantaneous payoffs and/or the state dynamics functions involve not only the state and the action profile but also the joint distributions of state-action pairs. This article presents some engineering applications of mean-field-type games including road traffic networks, multi-level building evacuation, millimeter wave wireless communications, distributed power networks, virus spread over networks, virtual machine resource management in cloud networks, synchronization of oscillators, energy-efficient buildings, online meeting and mobile crowdsensing.Comment: 84 pages, 24 figures, 183 references. to appear in AIMS 201

Team decision theory for linear continuous-time systems

This paper develops a team decision theory for linear-quadratic (LQ) continuous-time systems. First, a counterpart of the well-known result of Radner on quadratic static teams is obtained for two-member continuous-time LQ static team problems when the statistics of the random variables involved are not necessarily Gaussian. An iterative convergent scheme is developed, which in the limit yields the optimal team strategies. For the special case of Gaussian distributions, the team-optimal solution is affine in the information available to each DM, and for the further special case when the team cost function does not penalize the intermediate values of state, the optimal strategies can be obtained by solving a Liapunov type time-invariant matrix equation. This static theory is then extended to LQG continuous-time dynamic teams with sampled observations under the one-step-delay observation sharing pattern. The unique solution is again affine in the information available to each DM, and further, it features a certainty-equivalence property

Structural Results for Decentralized Stochastic Control with a Word-of-Mouth Communication

In this paper, we analyze a network of agents that communicate through the ``word of mouth," in which, every agent communicates only with its neighbors. We introduce the prescription approach, present some of its properties and show that it leads to a new information state. We also state preliminary structural results for optimal control strategies in systems that evolve using word-of-mouth communication. The proposed approach can be generalized to analyze several decentralized systems

Signaling equilibria for dynamic LQG games with asymmetric information

We consider a finite horizon dynamic game with two players who observe their types privately and take actions, which are publicly observed. Players' types evolve as independent, controlled linear Gaussian processes and players incur quadratic instantaneous costs. This forms a dynamic linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) game with asymmetric information. We show that under certain conditions, players' strategies that are linear in their private types, together with Gaussian beliefs form a perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) of the game. Furthermore, it is shown that this is a signaling equilibrium due to the fact that future beliefs on players' types are affected by the equilibrium strategies. We provide a backward-forward algorithm to find the PBE. Each step of the backward algorithm reduces to solving an algebraic matrix equation for every possible realization of the state estimate covariance matrix. The forward algorithm consists of Kalman filter recursions, where state estimate covariance matrices depend on equilibrium strategies