Slide 4 of 38
Notes:
The framework is the following:
A set of users, who could be human or not , compete for a limited set of resources, each user requires access to some subset of the resources, and there is a “provider” who may have some control over contention. Index the uses by r, and resources by j, where Ajr is the amount of resource required by user r.
One can think of resources in a computer or distributed system, and the diagram suggests a network, which is the motivation underlying this work.
However it is instructive to reflect on other application areas, where the resources could be airline seats, or units of electrical power and the network is a power distribution network. Here very different methods are used to control contention, such as reservation and prices.
