Cost-Sharing Mechanism Design for Ride-Sharing

In this paper, we focus on the cost-sharing problem for ride-sharing that determines how to allocate the total ride cost between the driver and the passengers. We identify the properties that a desirable cost-sharing mechanism should have and develop a general framework which can be used to create specific cost-sharing mechanisms. We propose specific mechanisms … Read more

Acyclic Mechanism Design for Freight Consolidation

Freight consolidation is a logistics practice that improves the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of transportation operations, and also reduces energy consumption and carbon footprint. A “fair” shipping cost sharing scheme is indispensable to help establish and sustain the cooperation of a group of suppliers in freight consolidation. In this paper, we design a truthful acyclic mechanism … Read more

Resilient Course and Instructor Scheduling in the Mathematics Department at the United States Naval Academy

In this work, we study the problem of scheduling courses and instructors in the Mathematics Department at the United States Naval Academy (USNA) in a resilient manner. Every semester, the department needs to schedule around 70 instructors and 150-180 course sections into 30 class periods and 30 rooms. We formulate a stochastic integer linear program … Read more

Moulin Mechanism Design for Freight Consolidation

In freight consolidation, a “fair” cost allocation scheme is critical for forming and sustaining horizontal cooperation that leads to reduced transportation cost. We study a cost-sharing problem in a freight consolidation system with one consolidation center and a common destination. In particular, we design a mechanism that collects bids from a set of suppliers, and … Read more

Equilibrium Strategies for Multiple Interdictors on a Common Network

In this work, we introduce multi-interdictor games, which model interactions among multiple interdictors with differing objectives operating on a common network. As a starting point, we focus on shortest path multi-interdictor (SPMI) games, where multiple interdictors try to increase the shortest path lengths of their own adversaries attempting to traverse a common network. We first … Read more

Scheduling on a single machine under time-of-use electricity tariffs

We consider the problem of scheduling jobs on a single machine to minimize the total electricity cost of processing these jobs under time-of-use electricity tariffs. We consider both uniform-speed and speed-scalable machine environments. For the uniform-speed case, we prove that this problem is strongly NP-hard, and in fact inapproximable within a constant factor, unless P … Read more

Dynamic Cost Allocation for Economic Lot Sizing Games

We consider a cooperative game defined by an economic lot sizing problem with concave ordering costs over a finite time horizon, in which each player faces demand for a single product in each period and coalitions can pool orders. We show how to compute a dynamic cost allocation in the strong sequential core of this … Read more

Dynamic Linear Programming Games with Risk-Averse Players

Motivated by situations in which independent agents, or players, wish to cooperate in some uncertain endeavor over time, we study dynamic linear programming games, which generalize classical linear production games to multi-period settings under uncertainty. We specifically consider that players may have risk-averse attitudes towards uncertainty, and model this risk aversion using coherent conditional risk … Read more

Stochastic linear programming games with concave preferences

We study stochastic linear programming games: a class of stochastic cooperative games whose payoffs under any realization of uncertainty are determined by a specially structured linear program. These games can model a variety of settings, including inventory centralization and cooperative network fortification. We focus on the core of these games under an allocation scheme that … Read more

On Traveling Salesman Games with Asymmetric Costs

We consider cooperative traveling salesman games with non-negative asymmetric costs satisfying the triangle inequality. We construct a stable cost allocation with budget balance guarantee equal to the Held-Karp integrality gap for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem, using the parsimonious property and a previously unknown connection to linear production games. We also show that our techniques … Read more