Game Theory Considerations in Computational Sustainability

  • Bo An | Nanyang Technological University

In this talk I will discuss two recent works on applying game theory for computational sustainability. The first one is on taxi system efficiency optimization. A long-standing problem in Beijing’s taxi market is that most taxi drivers intentionally avoid working during peak hours despite of the huge customer demand within these peak periods. The existence of this dilemma is mainly triggered by the ignorance of taxi drivers’ congestion costs in the present taxi fare structure. To resolve this problem, we propose a new pricing scheme and the major challenge is the computational intensiveness to identify the optimal strategy of taxi drivers due to the exponentially large size of the taxi drivers’ strategy space and the scheduling constraints. The second work is on electric vehicle charging station placement considering 1) EV drivers’ strategic behaviors to minimize their charging cost, and 2) the mutual impact of EV drivers’ strategies on the traffic conditions of the road network and service quality of charging stations.

Speaker Details

Bo An is a Nanyang Assistant Professor with the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current research interests include artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, game theory, and optimization. He has published over 40 referred papers at AAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI, ICAPS, JAAMAS and IEEE Transactions. Dr. An was the recipient of the 2010 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award, an Operational Excellence Award from the Commander, First Coast Guard District of the United States, the Best Innovative Application Paper Award at AAMAS’12, and the 2012 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. He is a member of the Board of Directors of IFAAMAS.

Series: Microsoft Research Talks