An application of membrane computing to humanitarian relief via generalized Nash equilibrium

Natural and political disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis, but also migration and refugees crisis, need quick and coordinated responses in order to support vulnerable populations. In such disasters, nongovernmental organizations compete with each other for financial donations,...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Luque Cerpa, Alejandro, Orellana Martín, David, Gutiérrez Naranjo, Miguel Ángel
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repository:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/172817
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/172817
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41965-025-00187-y
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Membrane computing
Game theory
Nash equilibrium
Description
Summary:Natural and political disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis, but also migration and refugees crisis, need quick and coordinated responses in order to support vulnerable populations. In such disasters, nongovernmental organizations compete with each other for financial donations, while people who need assistance suffer a lack of coordination, congestion in terms of logistics, and duplication of services. From a theoretical point of view, this problem can be formalized as a generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) problem. This is a generalization of the Nash equilibrium problem, where the agents’ strategies are not fixed but depend on the other agents’ strategies. In this paper, we show that membrane computing can model humanitarian relief as a GNE problem. We propose a family of P systems that compute GNE in this context, and we illustrate their capabilities with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as a case study.