A Stackelberg Strategy for Routing Flow over Time

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Stackelberg strategy for routing flow over time, providing a computational approach that guarantees network efficiency within a small constant factor of optimal, improving understanding of dynamic routing competition.

Contribution

It presents the first efficiently computable Stackelberg strategy for flow over time routing games, analyzing its impact on network efficiency under competitive equilibrium.

Findings

The strategy guarantees network efficiency within a small constant factor of optimal.

The approach applies to two natural measures of optimality.

It advances the understanding of dynamic routing game efficiency.

Abstract

Routing games are used to to understand the impact of individual users' decisions on network efficiency. Most prior work on routing games uses a simplified model of network flow where all flow exists simultaneously, and users care about either their maximum delay or their total delay. Both of these measures are surrogates for measuring how long it takes to get all of a user's traffic through the network. We attempt a more direct study of how competition affects network efficiency by examining routing games in a flow over time model. We give an efficiently computable Stackelberg strategy for this model and show that the competitive equilibrium under this strategy is no worse than a small constant times the optimal, for two natural measures of optimality.