Contested Route Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic approach to contested route planning, using randomized strategies and the double-oracle framework to produce robust, unpredictable routes that are computationally feasible and effective against adversaries.

Contribution

It presents a novel game-theoretic model for contested routing, employing the double-oracle method for efficient computation of diversified plans in adversarial environments.

Findings

The approach scales to realistic problem sizes.

Modeling the adversary improves route robustness.

The method computes plans in seconds.

Abstract

We consider the problem of routing for logistics purposes, in a contested environment where an adversary attempts to disrupt the vehicle along the chosen route. We construct a game-theoretic model that captures the problem of optimal routing in such an environment. While basic robust deterministic routing plans are already challenging to devise, they tend to be predictable, which can limit their effectiveness. By introducing calculated randomness via modeling the route planning process as a two-player zero-sum game, we compute immediately deployable plans that are diversified and harder to anticipate. Although solving the game exactly is intractable in theory, our use of the double-oracle framework enables us to achieve computation times on the order of seconds, making the approach operationally viable. In particular, the framework is modular enough to accommodate specialized routing algorithms as oracles. We evaluate our method on real-world scenarios, showing that it scales effectively to realistic problem sizes and significantly benefits from explicitly modeling the adversary's capabilities, as demonstrated through ablation studies and comparisons with baseline approaches.