Game Model of Stable Cooperation During Resource Distribution in Self-Organized Emergency Management System

In the short term after an emergency, the relief resources require some workers to distribute to various delivery sites through a self-organized cooperation. How to achieve a stable cooperation is an important issue of the self-organized resource distribution in emergency. This paper proposes a potential game theoretic formulation for the stable cooperation during resource distribution in Self-organized Emergency Management System (SEMS). In the potential game distribution model, the private utility function of each worker is defined based on the Aumann-Drèze value, which makes sure of the existence of Nash equilibrium and permutable equilibrium solutions in resource distribution. Then, we prove the non-decreasing and submodularity of the social utility function, ensuring that any Nash equilibrium is guaranteed at least 50% of suboptimality, and the best Nash equilibrium is the optimal solution. In this way, the optimal distribution scheme is transformed into the solution of Nash equilibrium, and the consistent control of individual rationality (maximizing the private utility) and system objective (maximizing the social utility) is realized. We take the COVID-19 epidemic in Changchun of China as a simulation of SEMS. It verifies that potential game is an efficient approach to obtain stable cooperation during self-organized resource distribution. Moreover, the number of workers and the possibility of workers choosing suboptimal decisions are key factors for forming stable cooperation.