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SUMMARY:An Online Allocation Mechanism with Pre-Commitment and its Applica
 tion to Electric Vehicle Charging - Valentin Robu\, University of Southamp
 ton
DTSTART:20140220T153000Z
DTEND:20140220T163000Z
UID:TALK51007@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins
DESCRIPTION:We introduce a novel online mechanism that schedules the alloc
 ation of an expiring resource among a set of self-interested agents. There
  are many real-life instances of this problem\, including in smart grids\,
  cloud computing and online advertising. A key application we study is the
  charging of electric vehicles\, where owners arrive dynamically over time
 \, and each owner requires a minimum amount of charge by its departure to 
 complete its next trip. In order to truthfully elicit the agents' preferen
 ces in this setting\, we introduce the new concept of pre-commitment: When
 ever an agent is selected\, our mechanism pre-commits to charging the vehi
 cle by its reported departure time\, but maintains flexibility about when 
 the charging takes place. We show that our pre-commitment mechanism incent
 ivises truthful reporting when coupled with a state of the art online sche
 duling heuristic. Furthermore\, through simulations based on real-world da
 ta\, we show that the average utility achieved by our mechanism is over 93
 % of the offline optimal.
LOCATION:Auditorium\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 21 Station Road\, Cambridge
 \, CB1 2FB
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