Flows over time are a natural way to incorporate flow dynamics that arise in various applications such as traffic networks. In this talk we introduce a natural variant of the deterministic fluid queuing model in which users aim to minimize their costs subject to arrival at their destination before a pre-specified deadline. We determine the existence and the structure of Nash flows over time and fully characterize the price of anarchy for this model. The price of anarchy measures the ratio of the quality of the equilibrium and the quality of the optimum flow, where we evaluate the quality using two different natural performance measures: the throughput for a given deadline and the makespan for a given amount of flow. While it turns out that both prices of anarchy can be unbounded in general, we provide tight bounds for the important subclass of parallel path graphs.
Tim Oosterwijk: Bicriteria Nash Flows over Time 15 April 2026 16:00 - 17:00
About Tim Oosterwijk: Bicriteria Nash Flows over Time
Starting date
- 15 April 2026
Time
- 16:00 - 17:00
Location
- VU Main Building
Address
- De Boelelaan 1105
- 1081 HV Amsterdam
Organised by
- Operations Analytics
Language
- English
Tim Oosterwijk
Tim Oosterwijk studied Industrial and Applied Mathematics at Eindhoven University of Technology before obtaining a PhD in Operations Research from Maastricht University. Afterwards, he held a postdoc position at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Chile and at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany. He is a member of the Operations Analytics department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam since 2021. His main research areas are algorithmic game theory, algorithmic mechanism design, and approximation algorithms. Over the past years, he focused mostly on flows over time, routing problems and optimal stopping problems. His research is fundamental in nature, but is driven by problems observed in practice that suffer from a lack of coordination or resource limitations.
Interested in attending the seminar or in giving a talk?
Please send an email to Tim Oosterwijk