Achievement

Trainees Daniel Ayala of Computer Science continued working with faculty members from Computer Science and Civil and Materials Engineering on the problem of spatio-temporal matching where agents compete for spatio-temporal resources. Examples could include drivers who compete for parking spaces; taxi-cabs that compete for customers. They introduced two notions of resource choice: the optimal and the equilibrium. The equilibrium describes the behavior of individual, selfish agents in a system. They studied how a pricing authority can use the resource availability information to set prices that entice drivers to choose parking in the optimal way, the way that minimizes total driving distance by the vehicles and is then better for the transportation system (by reducing congestion) and for the environment. Simulations showed that the proposed pricing schemas can reduce total distance traveled by up to 23%.