28,273 research outputs found
Allocation in Practice
How do we allocate scarcere sources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These
are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects
at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been
working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with
food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting
and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must
decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives
rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered
in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation
within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has
several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.Comment: To appear in Proc. of 37th edition of the German Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (KI 2014), Springer LNC
Elastic Multi-resource Network Slicing: Can Protection Lead to Improved Performance?
In order to meet the performance/privacy requirements of future
data-intensive mobile applications, e.g., self-driving cars, mobile data
analytics, and AR/VR, service providers are expected to draw on shared
storage/computation/connectivity resources at the network "edge". To be
cost-effective, a key functional requirement for such infrastructure is
enabling the sharing of heterogeneous resources amongst tenants/service
providers supporting spatially varying and dynamic user demands. This paper
proposes a resource allocation criterion, namely, Share Constrained Slicing
(SCS), for slices allocated predefined shares of the network's resources, which
extends the traditional alpha-fairness criterion, by striking a balance among
inter- and intra-slice fairness vs. overall efficiency. We show that SCS has
several desirable properties including slice-level protection, envyfreeness,
and load driven elasticity. In practice, mobile users' dynamics could make the
cost of implementing SCS high, so we discuss the feasibility of using a simpler
(dynamically) weighted max-min as a surrogate resource allocation scheme. For a
setting with stochastic loads and elastic user requirements, we establish a
sufficient condition for the stability of the associated coupled network
system. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, we show via extensive simulations
that while SCS (and/or the surrogate weighted max-min allocation) provides
inter-slice protection, they can achieve improved job delay and/or perceived
throughput, as compared to other weighted max-min based allocation schemes
whose intra-slice weight allocation is not share-constrained, e.g., traditional
max-min or discriminatory processor sharing
Balancing the Tradeoff between Profit and Fairness in Rideshare Platforms During High-Demand Hours
Rideshare platforms, when assigning requests to drivers, tend to maximize profit for the system and/or minimize waiting time for riders. Such platforms can exacerbate biases that drivers may have over certain types of requests. We consider the case of peak hours when the demand for rides is more than the supply of drivers. Drivers are well aware of their advantage during the peak hours and can choose to be selective about which rides to accept. Moreover, if in such a scenario, the assignment of requests to drivers (by the platform) is made only to maximize profit and/or minimize wait time for riders, requests of a certain type (e.g. from a non-popular pickup location, or to a non-popular drop-off location) might never be assigned to a driver. Such a system can be highly unfair to riders. However, increasing fairness might come at a cost of the overall profit made by the rideshare platform. To balance these conflicting goals, we present a flexible, non-adaptive algorithm, \lpalg, that allows the platform designer to control the profit and fairness of the system via parameters and respectively. We model the matching problem as an online bipartite matching where the set of drivers is offline and requests arrive online. Upon the arrival of a request, we use \lpalg to assign it to a driver (the driver might then choose to accept or reject it) or reject the request. We formalize the measures of profit and fairness in our setting and show that by using \lpalg, the competitive ratios for profit and fairness measures would be no worse than and respectively. Extensive experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets confirm the validity of our theoretical lower bounds. Additionally, they show that \lpalg under some choice of can beat two natural heuristics, Greedy and Uniform, on \emph{both} fairness and profit
Computational Intelligence Inspired Data Delivery for Vehicle-to-Roadside Communications
We propose a vehicle-to-roadside communication protocol based on distributed clustering where a coalitional game approach is used to stimulate the vehicles to join a cluster, and a fuzzy logic algorithm is employed to generate stable clusters by considering multiple metrics of vehicle velocity, moving pattern, and signal qualities between vehicles. A reinforcement learning algorithm with game theory based reward allocation is employed to guide each vehicle to select the route that can maximize the whole network performance. The protocol is integrated with a multi-hop data delivery virtualization scheme that works on the top of the transport layer and provides high performance for multi-hop end-to-end data transmissions. We conduct realistic computer simulations to show the performance advantage of the protocol over other approaches
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