The Complexity of Optimizing Atomic Congestion

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Brand, Cornelius, Ganian, Robert, Kalyanasundaram, Subrahmanyam, Inerney, Fionn Mc
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Brand, Cornelius
Ganian, Robert
Kalyanasundaram, Subrahmanyam
Inerney, Fionn Mc
author_facet Brand, Cornelius
Ganian, Robert
Kalyanasundaram, Subrahmanyam
Inerney, Fionn Mc
contents Atomic congestion games are a classic topic in network design, routing, and algorithmic game theory, and are capable of modeling congestion and flow optimization tasks in various application areas. While both the price of anarchy for such games as well as the computational complexity of computing their Nash equilibria are by now well-understood, the computational complexity of computing a system-optimal set of strategies -- that is, a centrally planned routing that minimizes the average cost of agents -- is severely understudied in the literature. We close this gap by identifying the exact boundaries of tractability for the problem through the lens of the parameterized complexity paradigm. After showing that the problem remains highly intractable even on extremely simple networks, we obtain a set of results which demonstrate that the structural parameters which control the computational (in)tractability of the problem are not vertex-separator based in nature (such as, e.g., treewidth), but rather based on edge separators. We conclude by extending our analysis towards the (even more challenging) min-max variant of the problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_10219
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Complexity of Optimizing Atomic Congestion
Brand, Cornelius
Ganian, Robert
Kalyanasundaram, Subrahmanyam
Inerney, Fionn Mc
Computer Science and Game Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Complexity
Atomic congestion games are a classic topic in network design, routing, and algorithmic game theory, and are capable of modeling congestion and flow optimization tasks in various application areas. While both the price of anarchy for such games as well as the computational complexity of computing their Nash equilibria are by now well-understood, the computational complexity of computing a system-optimal set of strategies -- that is, a centrally planned routing that minimizes the average cost of agents -- is severely understudied in the literature. We close this gap by identifying the exact boundaries of tractability for the problem through the lens of the parameterized complexity paradigm. After showing that the problem remains highly intractable even on extremely simple networks, we obtain a set of results which demonstrate that the structural parameters which control the computational (in)tractability of the problem are not vertex-separator based in nature (such as, e.g., treewidth), but rather based on edge separators. We conclude by extending our analysis towards the (even more challenging) min-max variant of the problem.
title The Complexity of Optimizing Atomic Congestion
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Complexity
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10219