Can multiple contractors self-regulate their joint service delivery?: A serious gaming experiment on road maintenance planning

The next step in the use of innovative, dynamic and performance-based contracts for service delivery by contractors could be use of monetary incentives to stimulate self-regulation of the network. Because it is currently unclear how performance-based payments in network tenders can effectively encourage network members to coordinate their own...

The Road Maintenance Planning Game: Game design and first results

This white paper describes the Road Maintenance Planning game, a game that simulates planning, coordination and execution of maintenance projects in the domain of infrastructural maintenance. In particular, the game models the dynamic contracting procedure of Volker et al. (2014), an innovative way of contracting public works to a team group of...

Solving Transition-Independent Multi-agent MDPs with Sparse Interactions

In cooperative multi-agent sequential decision making under uncertainty, agents must coordinate to find an optimal joint policy that maximises joint value. Typical algorithms exploit additive structure in the value function, but in the fully-observable multi-agent MDP (MMDP) setting such structure is not present. We propose a new optimal solver...

Planning under uncertainty for coordinating infrastructural maintenance (abstract)

Scheduling of infrastructural maintenance poses a complex multi-agent problem. Commonly a central authority is responsible for the quality and throughput of the infrastructure, while the actual maintenance is performed by multiple self-interested contractors. Not only does the central authority have to (economically) incentivise agents to...

Planning under Uncertainty for Coordinating Infrastructural Maintenance (abstract)

Scheduling of infrastructural maintenance poses a complex multi-agent problem. Commonly a central authority is responsible for the quality and throughput of the infrastructure, while the actual maintenance is performed by multiple self-interested contractors. Not only does the central authority have to (economically) incentivise agents to...

Planning under Uncertainty for Coordinating Infrastructural Maintenance

We address efficient planning of maintenance activities in infrastructural networks, inspired by the real-world problem of servicing a highway network. A road authority is responsible for the quality, throughput and maintenance costs of the network, while the actual maintenance is performed by autonomous, third-party contractors. From a (multi...

Dynamic Mechanism Design for Efficient Planning under Uncertainty

We study the planning of maintenance activities on public infrastructural networks – road networks, Internet, power grids, etc. – in contingent environments such that the negative impact on the network user is minimised. Traditional efforts hereto are mainly of a regulatory nature, whereas we propose charging the service-providers (agents)...