Jorge Cortés

Professor

Cymer Corporation Endowed Chair





Distributed convergence to Nash equilibria by adversarial networks with undirected topologies
B. Gharesifard, J. Cortés
Proceedings of the American Control Conference, Montréal, Canada, 2012, pp. 5881-5886


Abstract

This paper considers a class of strategic scenarios in which two undirected networks of agents have opposing objectives with regards to the optimization of a common objective function. In the resulting zero-sum game, individual agents collaborate with neighbors in their respective network and have only partial knowledge of the state of the agents in the other one. We synthesize a distributed saddle-point algorithm that is implementable via local interactions and establish its convergence to the set of Nash equilibria for a class of strictly concave-convex and locally Lipschitz objective functions. Our algorithm synthesis builds on a continuous-time optimization strategy for finding the set of minimizers of a sum of convex functions in a distributed way. As a byproduct, we show that this strategy can be itself cast as a saddle-point dynamics and use this fact to establish its asymptotic convergence properties. The technical approach combines tools from algebraic graph theory, nonsmooth analysis, set-valued dynamical systems, and game theory.

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Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego
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