Firefighting as a game

The Firefighter Problem was proposed in 1995 [16] as a deterministic discrete-time model for the spread (and containment) of a fire. Its applications reach from real fires to the spreading of diseases and the containment of floods. Furthermore, it can be used to model the spread of computer viruses...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Álvarez Faura, M. del Carme|||0000-0003-2352-0546, Blesa Aguilera, Maria Josep|||0000-0001-8246-9926, Molter, Hendrik
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2014
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/28172
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/28172
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13123-8_9
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Game theory
Firefighter problem
Spreading models for networks
Algorithmic game theory
Nash equilibria
Price of anarchy
Coalitions
Jocs, Teoria de
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Informàtica teòrica
Descripción
Sumario:The Firefighter Problem was proposed in 1995 [16] as a deterministic discrete-time model for the spread (and containment) of a fire. Its applications reach from real fires to the spreading of diseases and the containment of floods. Furthermore, it can be used to model the spread of computer viruses or viral marketing in communication networks. In this work, we study the problem from a game-theoretical perspective. Such a context seems very appropriate when applied to large networks, where entities may act and make decisions based on their own interests, without global coordination. We model the Firefighter Problem as a strategic game where there is one player for each time step who decides where to place the firefighters. We show that the Price of Anarchy is linear in the general case, but at most 2 for trees. We prove that the quality of the equilibria improves when allowing coalitional cooperation among players. In general, we have that the Price of Anarchy is in T(n/k) where k is the coalition size. Furthermore, we show that there are topologies which have a constant Price of Anarchy even when constant sized coalitions are considered.