Budgeted Personalized Incentive Approaches for Smoothing Congestion in Resource Networks

Congestion occurs when there is competition for resources by selfish agents. In this paper, we are concerned with smoothing out congestion in a network of resources by using personalized well-timed incentives that are subject to budget constraints. To that end, we provide: (i) a mathematical formulation that computes equilibrium for the resource sharing congestion game with incentives and budget constraints; (ii) an integrated approach that scales to larger problems by exploiting the factored network structure and approximating the attained equilibrium; (iii) an iterative best response algorithm for solving the unconstrained version (no budget) of the resource sharing congestion game; and (iv) theoretical and empirical results (on an illustrative theme park problem) that demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.