Dynamic access pricing control for fair and stable resource sharing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dynamic pricing control system that balances demand management and fairness among autonomous agents sharing limited resources, addressing social regressiveness in traditional pricing models.

Contribution

It proposes a new pricing scheme that ensures fair access for both price-sensitive and insensitive traffic, supported by a switched non-linear ODE model and stability analysis.

Findings

The new pricing system achieves a balance between demand control and fairness.

Simulations demonstrate the stability and fairness tradeoff.

The approach effectively manages resource sharing among autonomous agents.

Abstract

We consider the use of pricing as a regulatory mechanism when an unknown number of autonomous agents compete for access to a shared resource (possibly limited in volume or capacity). In standard dynamic pricing control systems, an increasing price is used to balance supply and demand for a resource in a constrained environment. A major drawback of dynamic pricing is that it is socially regressive, i.e., unfair, as such systems favour price-insensitive (unresponsive) traffic and control the demand at the expense of price-sensitive (responsive) traffic. We tackle this fundamental issue by proposing a new form of pricing that strikes a balance between using price as a control mechanism to manage demand for a resource and ensuring fair access to the resource for both price-sensitive and insensitive traffic. Our system gives rise to a switched non-linear ODE model, the stability of which is equivalent to ensuring the fairness properties of the pricing control system. Simulations illustrate this stability-fairness tradeoff and with the results demonstrating the effectiveness of the overall design.