Decentralized PI control for a congestion game

The El Farol bar problem is a simple model of congestion and coordination behaviours that occur with shared resources. From a control-theoretic point of view, this problem can be viewed as a decentralized control problem. This work is a first step towards solving the El Farol bar congestion problem based on control theory. A decentralized proportional-integral (PI) control strategy is proposed and investigated via simulation. This strategy provides a simple mechanism for a large collection of decentralized decision makers to solve a complex congestion problem.

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