Game Theory in defence applications: a review

TL;DR

This paper reviews how game theory has been applied to model decision-making in defence scenarios, highlighting its effectiveness, various applications, and current limitations in the field.

Contribution

It provides a structured classification and summary of existing literature on game theory applications in defence, emphasizing the state-of-the-art and challenges.

Findings

Game theory effectively models decision-making of hostile actors.

Various branches of game theory have been applied to defence scenarios.

The review highlights benefits and limitations of game theory in defence.

Abstract

This paper presents a succinct review of attempts in the literature to use game theory to model decision making scenarios relevant to defence applications. Game theory has been proven as a very effective tool in modelling decision making processes of intelligent agents, entities, and players. It has been used to model scenarios from diverse fields such as economics, evolutionary biology, and computer science. In defence applications, there is often a need to model and predict actions of hostile actors, and players who try to evade or out-smart each other. Modelling how the actions of competitive players shape the decision making of each other is the forte of game theory. In past decades, there have been several studies which applied different branches of game theory to model a range of defence-related scenarios. This paper provides a structured review of such attempts, and classifies existing literature in terms of the kind of warfare modelled, the types of game used, and the players involved. The presented analysis provides a concise summary about the state-of-the-art with regards to the use of game theory in defence applications, and highlights the benefits and limitations of game theory in the considered scenarios.