Cooperative Team Strategies for Multi-player Perimeter-Defense Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable cooperative strategy algorithm for multi-player perimeter defense games, achieving optimality in certain scenarios and outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel polynomial-time assignment algorithm that accounts for cooperation and proves optimality in specific initial configurations.

Findings

The algorithm outperforms existing defense strategies.

Optimality is proven for certain initial configurations.

The method is scalable and computationally efficient.

Abstract

This paper studies a variant of the multi-player reach-avoid game played between intruders and defenders with applications to perimeter defense. The intruder team tries to score by sending as many intruders as possible to the target area, while the defender team tries to minimize this score by intercepting them. Finding the optimal strategies of the game is challenging due to the high dimensionality of the joint state space, and the existing works have proposed approximation methods to reduce the design of the defense strategy into assignment problems. However they suffer from either suboptimal defender performance or computational complexity. Based on a novel decomposition method, this paper proposes a scalable (polynomial-time) assignment algorithm that accommodates cooperative behaviors and outperforms the existing defense strategies. For a certain class of initial configurations, we derive the exact score by showing that the lower bound provided by the intruder team matches the upper bound provided by the defender team, which also proves the optimality of the team strategies.