Game-driven Engineering Systems

The scope of the research project lies at the intersection of game theory and theory of networked dynamical systems. Dynamical systems provide a mathematical description of a physical, engineering, or communication networks. We are particularly interested in a setting where producers and consumers, or, providers and users, naturally appear. Notable examples are power networks, flow networks, and Internet communications. In this setting, producers and consumers (providers and users) will decide their production and consumption level based on certain economical or societal considerations. These considerations can be translated into cost functions for producers and utility functions for consumers. Consequently, on the one hand we have a physical system whose stability and performance constraints must be respected, and on the other hand input variables of the system are bound to economic/optimality objectives.  In this project, we consider selfish agents who decide solely based on their own economic/societal benefits. To capture this selfishness, the game theory comes into the picture where producers/consumers become strategic and maximize their benefit given the action of other agents (“players” in the game theoretic terminology). While both stability/performance of engineering systems and games have been (separately) very well understood in the literature, coupling the two has been pursued in only a few works, primarily tailored for power networks. Considering the physical layer and the game layer simultaneously in a general setting is a fertile domain for research and is compatible with real world examples where physical and economically-driven decision variables are not detached.