Collective utility in hierarchical structures of collective adaptive systems: an application in transportation systems

This paper presents the definition of the collective utility of groups of entities called ensembles that come into a collaboration to accomplish their individual goals. We propose an analytic method for assessing the utility of an ensemble taking into account the entities preferences. We use this model to build a hierarchy of utilities that corresponds to the ensembles hierarchical structure and compute high level utilities incorporating lower level utilities. We apply this model to various scenarios of an urban mobility system, providing examples of utility functions in all levels. We formulate an optimization problem to allocate passengers in bus routes effectively and perform experiments to compare our approach with the optimal allocation of passengers in terms of collective utility.