A Game-Theoretic Approach to Decision Support for Intelligent Water Distribution

Cyber-physical systems, and the intelligent decision support systems that they enable, carry the promise of greater efficacy in environmental management. The complexity of the physical infrastructure subject to decisions by environmental management systems is often an impediment to this efficacy. Other challenges include fundamental differences in the operation of cyber and physical components, and significant interdependency among the cyber components that facilitate decision support and the physical components they control. The agent-based computing paradigm is proposed for surmounting these challenges, due to the flexibility of software agents as autonomous and intelligent decision-making components. In this paper, we utilize an agent-based system to illustrate the application of game theory to decision support for environmental management, in the context of intelligent water distribution. Simulation results are presented to validate the model proposed, and to investigate the effect of various model parameters on water allocation.