Project No.: 5003-045294 01.05.96 - 31.12.99

Project leader: Prof. Jürg Nievergelt, Institut für Theoretische Informatik, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETHZ)
e-mail: nievergelt@inf.ethz.ch

Name of project: Transport network management - cooperative and competitive decisions in distributed combinatorial optimization

Partners:
Prof. José D. P. Rolim, Centre Universitaire d’Informatique, University of Geneva
Prof. Peter Widmayer, Institut für Theoretische Informatik, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETHZ)

Funding: Sfr 848,763.-

Summary:
The main focus of interest in this project is the interaction between cooperation and competition among the agents in a distributed decision-making system. Perfect cooperation leads to centralized, global optimization techniques of operations research. In contrast, total competition is the realm of game theory. The area in-between, marked by partial cooperation and partial competition, may be an everyday phenomenon in human social interactions, but it has hardly been studied in the context of optimization problems.

In this project, Transport Network Management (TNM) has been chosen as a concrete area of application. The actual network - roads, pipelines, shipping lanes or air routes, with their particular means of conveyance - is irrelevant; in each case, the situation involves a variety of control centers which are responsible for different areas and which both interact and also exhibit overlapping areas of authority.

The applicants intend to address this set of problems on three levels:

• mathematical/algorithmic approach for optimization programs;
• design and implementation of a simulation/gaming lab;
• development of distributed data structures.

Cooperation:
The project is an integrated research project operated by the ETHZ institute of theoretical informatics, the University of Geneva information technology center and two Swiss companies, Swissair and Softadweis AG, Neuhausen (a medium-sized software house producing TNM systems).

Other business enterprises interested in collaborating in project phase two are the Zurich urban transit company Verkehrbetriebe Zürich (VBZ), AeroComputer SA Geneva, which produces software for planning functions of airline companies, and another transport company, Goth Logistik-Services.