Timed network games

Network games are widely used as a model for selfish resource-allocation problems. The classical model abstracts the fact that different users may use a resource at different times and for different duration – factors that play an important role in determining the costs of the users in reality. We consider here timed network games, which add time to network games. Each vertex v in the network is associated with a cost function, mapping the load on v to the price that a player pays for staying in v for one time unit with this load. The network is equipped with clocks, and, as in timed automata, edges are guarded by constraints on the values of the clocks, and their traversal may involve resetting some clocks. We also study the fragment of network games with a single clock that is not reset and thus keeps track only of the global time elapsed.

Authors

• Guy Avni
• Shibashis Guha
• Orna Kupferman

Keywords

• Network games
• Timed automata
• Nash equilibrium
• Equilibrium inefficiency