Transactive Multi-Agent Systems over Flow Networks

TL;DR

This paper develops a pricing-based framework for transactive multi-agent systems over flow networks, ensuring efficient resource sharing and social acceptance through equilibrium analysis and utility function design.

Contribution

It introduces a novel market-based approach with a pricing mechanism that internalizes flow constraints and proposes a method to achieve social acceptance in resource sharing.

Findings

Existence of competitive and social welfare equilibria under convexity.

A new social acceptance sharing problem with homogeneous pricing.

Validation through extensive experiments confirms theoretical results.

Abstract

This paper presented insights into the implementation of transactive multi-agent systems over flow networks where local resources are decentralized. Agents have local resource demand and supply, and are interconnected through a flow network to support the sharing of local resources while respecting restricted sharing/flow capacity. We first establish a competitive market with a pricing mechanism that internalizes flow capacity constraints into agents' private decisions. We then demonstrate through duality theory that competitive equilibrium and social welfare equilibrium exist and agree under convexity assumptions, indicating the efficiency of the pricing mechanism. Additionally, a new social acceptance sharing problem is defined to investigate homogeneous pricing when the optimal sharing prices at all agents under competitive equilibrium are always equal for social acceptance. A conceptual computation method is proposed, prescribing a class of socially admissible utility functions to solve the social acceptance problem. A special case of linear-quadratic multi-agent systems over undirected star graphs is provided as a pedagogical example of how to explicitly prescribe socially admissible utility functions. Finally, extensive experiments are provided to validate the results.