A New Family of Feasible Methods for Distributed Resource Allocation

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 non-asymptotic feasibility guarantees for the iterates, since overall-location 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.