A New Family of Feasible Methods for Distributed Resource Allocation

Abstract: Distributed resource allocation is a central task in network systems such as smart grids, water distribution networks, and urban transportation systems. When solving such problems in practice it is often important to have nonasymptotic feasibility guarantees for the iterates, since overallocation of resources easily causes systems to break down. In this paper, we develop a distributed resource reallocation algorithm where every iteration produces a feasible allocation. The algorithm is fully distributed in the sense that nodes communicate only with neighbors over a given communication network. We prove that under mild conditions the algorithm converges to a point arbitrarily close to the optimal resource allocation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the competitive practical performance of the algorithm.