Network Improvement for Equilibrium Routing

Umang Bhaskar, Katrina Ligett, Leonard J. Schulman

Abstract: In routing games, agents pick routes through a network to minimize their own delay. A primary concern for the network designer in routing games is the average agent delay at equilibrium. A number of methods to control this average delay have received substantial attention, including network tolls, Stackelberg routing, and edge removal. A related approach with arguably greater practical relevance is that of making investments in improvements to the edges of the network, so that, for a given investment budget, the average delay at equilibrium in the improved network is minimized. This problem has received considerable attention in the literature on transportation research. We study a model for this problem introduced in transportation research literature, and present both hardness results and algorithms that obtain tight performance guarantees.