Migration is one of the many responses humans and societies make to ongoing demographic, economic, societal and environmental changes. In this work, we use agent-based modeling (ABM) to study the dynamics of migration flows across provinces and cities in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. The strength of ABM is that it allows a bottom-up approach that focuses on how individuals make decisions in a complex system comprising various factors. Outputs of our agent-based model are automatically calibrated with actual data using a genetic algorithm. This automated calibration yields some significant improvement in the results, with all observed net- and out-migration data captured within the 95% confidence interval. Sensitivity analysis carried out helps to further understand the impact of critical factors on the final migration decision.

Wireless network virtualization has been advocated as one of the most promising technologies to provide multifarious services and applications for the future Internet by enabling multiple isolated virtual wireless networks to coexist and share the same physical wireless resources. Based on the multiple concurrent virtual wireless networks running on the shared physical substrate, service providers can independently manage and deploy different end-users services. This paper proposes a new formulation for bandwidth allocation and routing problem for multiple virtual wireless networks that operate on top of a single substrate network to minimize the operation cost of the substrate network. We also propose a preventive traffic disruption model for virtual wireless networks to minimize the amount of traffic that service providers have to reduce when substrate links fail by incorporating $\ell _{1}$ -norm into the objective function. Due to the large number of constraints in both normal state and link failure states, the formulated problem becomes a large-scale optimization problem and is very challenging to solve using the centralized computational method. Therefore, we propose the decomposition algorithms using the alternating direction method of multipliers that can be implemented in a parallel and distributed fashion. The simulation results demonstrate the computational efficiency of our proposed algorithms as well as the advantage of the formulated model in ensuring the minimal amount of traffic disruption when substrate links fail.

Demand-side management, together with the integration of distributed energy storage have an essential role in the process of improving the efficiency and reliability of the power grid. In this paper, we consider a smart power system in which users are equipped with energy storage devices. Users will request their energy demands from an energy provider who determines their energy payments based on the load profiles of users. By scheduling the energy consumption and storage of users regulated by a central controller, the energy provider tries to minimize the square euclidean distance between the instantaneous energy demand and the average demand of the power system. The users intend to reduce their energy payment by jointly scheduling their appliances and controlling the charging and discharging process for their energy storage devices. We apply game theory to formulate the energy consumption and storage game for the distributed design, in which the players are the users and their strategies are the energy consumption schedules for appliances and storage devices. Based on the game theory setup and proximal decomposition, we also propose two distributed demand side management algorithms executed by users in which each user tries to minimize its energy payment, while still preserving the privacy of users as well as minimizing the amount of required signaling with the central controller. In simulation results, we show that the proposed algorithms provide optimality for both energy provider and users.