Safe Delivery of Critical Services in Areas with Volatile Security Situation via a Stackelberg Game Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Stackelberg game framework for optimizing the placement of vaccination centers in insecure areas, balancing security and service coverage under resource constraints, with scalable solutions demonstrated through experiments.

Contribution

It develops a novel mixed optimization approach with duality conditions for secure service delivery, addressing a complex combinatorial-continuous problem.

Findings

Proposed a scalable approximation method for the optimization problem.

Identified duality conditions for mixed discrete and continuous variables.

Validated scalability through detailed experiments.

Abstract

Vaccine delivery in under-resourced locations with security risks is not just challenging but also life threatening. The current COVID pandemic and the need to vaccinate have added even more urgency to this issue. Motivated by this problem, we propose a general framework to set-up limited temporary (vaccination) centers that balance physical security and desired (vaccine) service coverage with limited resources. We set-up the problem as a Stackelberg game between the centers operator (defender) and an adversary, where the set of centers is not fixed a priori but is part of the decision output. This results in a mixed combinatorial and continuous optimization problem. As part of our scalable approximation of this problem, we provide a fundamental contribution by identifying general duality conditions of switching max and min when both discrete and continuous variables are involved. We perform detailed experiments to show that the solution proposed is scalable in practice.