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arXiv · 1903.01449

Linearly Solvable Mean-Field Traffic Routing Games

Takashi Tanaka·Ehsan Nekouei·Ali Reza Pedram·Karl Henrik Johansson
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Abstract

We consider a dynamic traffic routing game over an urban road network involving a large number of drivers in which each driver selecting a particular route is subject to a penalty that is affine in the logarithm of the number of drivers selecting the same route. We show that the mean-field approximation of such a game leads to the so-called linearly solvable Markov decision process, implying that its mean-field equilibrium (MFE) can be found simply by solving a finite-dimensional linear system backward in time. Based on this backward-only characterization, it is further shown that the obtained MFE has the notable property of strong time-consistency. A connection between the obtained MFE and a particular class of fictitious play is also discussed.

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Takashi Tanaka, Ehsan Nekouei, Ali Reza Pedram, Karl Henrik Johansson. 2019-03-04. Linearly Solvable Mean-Field Traffic Routing Games. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.01449

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