A Game-Based Economic Model for Price Decision Making in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems

Cyber-physical-social (CPS) systems integrate Big Data Collectors (BDCs), Service Organizers (SOs) and users to build a unified data-centric computing framework. In CPS systems, BDCs leverage a vast variety of sensing devices to collect cyber-physical-social data, and report these data to SOs to orchestrate various services provided to users, thus offering a great potential for solving complex network tasks that are far beyond the capabilities of existing networks. However, due to the lack of an economic model to describe such complex data interactions, their applications are limited. So, a game-based economic model is proposed in this paper to make smart price decisions in CPS systems. Specifically, it has the following innovations: (a) The economic model gives a dynamic game income matrix which can accurately describe the revenue changes of BDCs in the game, so as to help BDCs select appropriate game parameters and strategies, and make BDCs competitive in the game. (b) The economic model can help SOs to make optimized data purchase price and service selling price based on data collection cost and competitor price analysis, so that SOs can have a better Quality of Service (QoS) and users attraction, and maximize the profit. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can help BDCs and SOs find the most suitable game strategy and price adjustment principle, which has great significance in applications.