Dr. Paolo Scarabaggio "Seeking Nash Equilibria under Nonconvex Coupling Constraints"
Channel: IEEE-CSS Italy Chapter
Date: 2023-03-03

Speaker: Dr. Paolo Scarabaggio, Politecnico di Bari, Bari
Hosting Institution: Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, L'Aquila, AQ
Location: Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Centro di Eccellenza DEWS
Date: February 23 2023
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Abstract:
In noncooperative games, a number of self-interested agents with individual dynamics and constraints aim at optimizing their objective functions, possibly in competition with each other, e.g. due to the scarcity of shared resources. Nash games represent the common way to define the solution of these games in many practical applications, from electricity markets to mobile-edge computing. From a control-theoretic perspective, the objective is to develop a coordination mechanism, namely, a discrete-time dynamical system for updating the strategies of the agents towards an equilibrium. This talk will focus on a class of Nash games with nonconvex coupling constraints where a novel notion of local equilibrium is defined leveraging on the theory of tangent cones. The stability properties of these equilibria as well as the conditions for their existence and uniqueness are presented and discussed. Two discrete-time distributed dynamics or fixed-point iterations are proposed to compute these equilibria, while the convergence is show under (strongly) monotone assumptions on the pseudo-gradient mapping of the game. Applications to energy demand management under power flow constraints are shown.
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Paolo Scarabaggio received the B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering, the M.Sc. degree in Management Engineering, and the Ph.D. in Electrical and Information Engineering from Politecnico di Bari, Italy, in 2017, 2019, and 2022, respectively. He is currently a researcher at the Decision and Control Laboratory of Politecnico di Bari (http://dclab.poliba.it/). In 2019, he was a visiting student at the Delft Center for Systems and Control, Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. His research interests include modeling, optimization, game theory, and control of complex multi-agent systems, with application in energy distribution systems, and social networks. He is author of 20+ printed international publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 IEEE CSS Italy Best Young Author Journal Paper Award.