# A Game Theoretic Framework for Surplus Food Distribution in Smart Cities and Beyond
## 1 Introduction  
For the last decade, food waste has been a major contributor towards several socioeconomic problems [1, 2], including, but not limited to, global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, water wastage, soil degradation, farmer suicides, price fluctuations, black marketing, and hoarding. On a global scale, more than 30% of all edible products end up as waste [3]. Each year, this wastage amounts to billions of tons of food, out of which near 60% is avoidable [4]. One of the solutions that can deal with this underrated yet serious problem of food wastage is surplus food redistribution. Distributing surplus food to areas where it is in deficit utilizes the generation of food waste at the surplus end and alleviates hunger at the deficit end. While this may not be a solution to the whole situation, it targets the 60% avoidable food waste into a win-win scenario for society as well as the economy of the land. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has taken this a step further [5] andmade the redistribution activity smoother by connecting the donors with the receivers and the available volunteers, by minimizing human interference as far as possible. The use of ICT brings the very desirable properties of sustainability and, more importantly, scalability to the table. ICT mediation in food redistribution is an extremely important contemporary topic [6] and is gaining fast popularity around the world due to its numerous upsides. In the smart cities of developing countries such as India, however, a lot remains to be done as the presence of food redistribution movements mediated by ICT is scarce and only limited to a few major cities. The discussion of a surplus food redistribution framework under strategic settings is a less discussed topic around the globe.  
This paper aims at addressing a surplus food redistribution framework under strategic settings, thereby facilitating a smoother exchange of surplus food in the smart cities of developing countries and beyond. This framework will be available via a handheld device-based app, a game theory-assisted ICT-based platform, that will allow users, hereafter referred to as _Agents_, to raise food requests as donors, receivers, and/or volunteers. This app will take other required information such as location, surplus food types, their expiry dates (packaged food items), preparation times (cooked food items), pickup, drop, donation, receipt related information, etc. as inputs as well. Just before the request submission, the agent will be able to set preferences for donation, pickup, or volunteering, as applicable. As ICT is seamlessly available in smart cities, the paper aims to focus the framework in these cities. However, this can be extended beyond smart cities to places with greater human involvement.  
This paper is organized as follows. The rest of this section (Section 1) presents the related work in this field. The system model and the proposed mechanism are discussed in Section 2. The mechanism has been analyzed in Section 3 and its simulation results are presented in Section 4. A discussion of the outcome has been put forward in Section 5, followed by conclusions and future work in Section 6.