Month: December 2019

A new article co-authored by Abbas Ehsanfar and Paul Grogan appears online for Journal of Network and Systems Management.

Auction-Based Algorithms for Routing and Task Scheduling in Federated Networks

This paper studies and develops multiple auction-based algorithms for resource exchange among decentralized systems in federated networks with distributed computational resources. Decentralized resource owners and users use processing, storage, and communication units to perform the available computational tasks at each time step while an auctioneer facilitates allocating resources. The auctioneer communicates with federates and receives bids for buying and selling resources, solves combinatorial problems, and proposes prices to federates. Multiple auction-based mechanisms are formulated and assessed using collective performance metrics in a networked federation. The auction-based algorithms include four reverse-bid and double-sided auctions: (1) first-price auction, (2) sequential non-linear pricing auction, (3) min–max closed-form pricing auction, and (4) balanced and maximizing closed-form pricing auction. For results, we assess algorithms for economic and computational efficiency using extensive simulation runs in hundreds of network topologies and initial conditions. The metrics introduced for our numerical validation include normalized bids and prices, collective values, and convergence rates.

Abbas Ehsanfar and Paul T. Grogan

A new article co-authored by Paul Grogan and Ambrosio Valencia-Romero appears online and open-access for Design Science.

Strategic Risk Dominance in Collective Systems Design

Engineered system architectures leveraging collaboration among multiple actors across organizational boundaries are envisioned to be more flexible, robust, or efficient than independent alternatives but also carry significant downside risks from new interdependencies added between constituents. This paper transitions the concept of risk dominance from equilibrium selection in game theory to engineering design as a strategic measure of collective stability for system of systems. A proposed method characterizes system design as a bi-level problem with two or more asymmetric decision-makers. A measure of risk dominance assesses strategic dynamics with respect to the stability of joint or collaborative architectures relative to independent alternatives using a novel linearization technique to approximate linear incentives among actors. An illustrative example case for an asymmetric three-player design scenario shows how strategic risk dominance can identify and mitigate architectures with unstable risk-reward dynamics.

Paul T. Grogan and Ambrosio Valencia-Romero