Routing games over time with FIFO policy

Abstract

We study atomic routing games where every agent travels both along its decided edges and through time. The agents arriving on an edge are first lined up in a first-in-first-out queue and may wait: an edge is associated with a capacity, which defines how many agents-per-time-step can pop from the queue’s head and enter the edge, to transit for a fixed delay. We show that the best-response optimization problem is not approximable, and that deciding the existence of a Nash equilibrium is complete for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. Then, we drop the rationality assumption, introduce a behavioral concept based on GPS navigation, and study its worst-case efficiency ratio to coordination.