ABSTRACTIn many ‘smart city’ applications, congestion arises in part due to the nature of signals received by individuals from a central authority. In the model of , each agent uses one out of multiple resources at each time instant. The per-use cost of a resource depends on the number of concurrent users. A central authority has up-to-date knowledge of the congestion across all resources and uses randomisation to provide a scalar or an interval for each resource at each time. In this paper, the interval to broadcast per resource is obtained by taking the minima and maxima of costs observed within a time window of length r, rather than by randomisation. We show that the resulting distribution of agents across resources also converges in distribution, under plausible assumptions about the evolution of the population over time.
Throughout, we are not aware of any theoretical guarantees on the behavior of policies similar to ours, as described in this paper and @cite_10 . Specifically, we are not aware of any other paper, which would study the broadcasting of intervals, instead of scalars, show its superiority, or study the behaviour of systems, where such signals are being provided. Compared to this paper, the set-up of @cite_10 is much simpler, and so are the proofs and simulations. Unlike @cite_10 , the approach presented in this paper does not employ randomisation, whose use may be unacceptable to the general public, allows for the same signal to be broadcast to all agents, such as at road-side displays, and considers a more elaborate model of the populational response, with risk-aware agents. Both this paper and @cite_10 suggest the importance of the control-theoretic aspects of information provision.
@cite_10
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We consider a multi-agent system where, at every time instant, many users choose to use one of multiple resources, whose performance depends on the number of concurrent users. In addition, a central agent has up-to-date knowledge of the congestion across all resources. What signals should the central agent broadcast to the individual users in order to reduce the total congestion? We model users with varying levels of aversion to risk, and a heterogeneous population of users over these levels. We consider signaling schemes that communicate for each resource an interval of possible congestion values, instead of scalar values. We show how to optimise over these intervals with respect to the social cost, under constraints that these intervals be consistent with past observations. Moreover, under mild assumptions, the resulting distribution of users across resources converges.