Who Let the Guards Out: Visual Support for Patrolling Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive visual tool to assist designers in analyzing and improving algorithms for patrolling games, enhancing decision-making in security patrol management across various environments.

Contribution

We developed a novel visualization tool that enables exploration, simulation, and evaluation of patrolling game algorithms, aiding designers in optimizing security patrol strategies.

Findings

Tool facilitates exploration of patrol routes and success probabilities

Case studies demonstrate improved understanding of algorithm outcomes

Prototype and datasets are publicly available for further use

Abstract

Effective security patrol management is critical for ensuring safety in diverse environments such as art galleries, airports, and factories. The behavior of patrols in these situations can be modeled by patrolling games. They simulate the behavior of the patrol and adversary in the building, which is modeled as a graph of interconnected nodes representing rooms. The designers of algorithms solving the game face the problem of analyzing complex graph layouts with temporal dependencies. Therefore, appropriate visual support is crucial for them to work effectively. In this paper, we present a novel tool that helps the designers of patrolling games explore the outcomes of the proposed algorithms and approaches, evaluate their success rate, and propose modifications that can improve their solutions. Our tool offers an intuitive and interactive interface, featuring a detailed exploration of patrol routes and probabilities of taking them, simulation of patrols, and other requested features. In close collaboration with experts in designing patrolling games, we conducted three case studies demonstrating the usage and usefulness of our tool. The prototype of the tool, along with exemplary datasets, is available at https://gitlab.fi.muni.cz/formela/strategy-vizualizer.