Multi-resource defensive strategies for patrolling games with alarm systems

TL;DR

This paper develops algorithms for multi-resource security strategies in patrolling games with alarm systems, addressing the complexity of coordinating multiple defensive resources under uncertainty.

Contribution

It introduces scalable algorithms for multi-resource strategies in security games with alarms, extending prior single-resource results and analyzing computational complexity.

Findings

Algorithms for minimum resource allocation ensuring coverage.

Strategies for coordinated and uncoordinated multi-resource responses.

Computational analysis demonstrating algorithm effectiveness.

Abstract

Security Games employ game theoretical tools to derive resource allocation strategies in security domains. Recent works considered the presence of alarm systems, even suffering various forms of uncertainty, and showed that disregarding alarm signals may lead to arbitrarily bad strategies. The central problem with an alarm system, unexplored in other Security Games, is finding the best strategy to respond to alarm signals for each mobile defensive resource. The literature provides results for the basic single-resource case, showing that even in that case the problem is computationally hard. In this paper, we focus on the challenging problem of designing algorithms scaling with multiple resources. First, we focus on finding the minimum number of resources assuring non-null protection to every target. Then, we deal with the computation of multi-resource strategies with different degrees of coordination among resources. For each considered problem, we provide a computational analysis and propose algorithmic methods.