Defending a City from Multi-Drone Attacks: A Sequential Stackelberg Security Games Approach

TL;DR

This paper models multi-drone city defense as a Sequential Stackelberg Security Game, introducing an efficient algorithm S2D2 that improves defense strategies based on extensive experiments and theoretical guarantees.

Contribution

It presents the S2D2 algorithm for strategic drone deployment, providing the first efficient solution with approximation guarantees for multi-drone city defense modeled as a Stackelberg game.

Findings

S2D2 outperforms greedy heuristics in extensive experiments.

The algorithm approximates Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium under certain city structure assumptions.

Validated on data from 80 real cities.

Abstract

To counter an imminent multi-drone attack on a city, defenders have deployed drones across the city. These drones must intercept/eliminate the threat, thus reducing potential damage from the attack. We model this as a Sequential Stackelberg Security Game, where the defender first commits to a mixed sequential defense strategy, and the attacker then best responds. We develop an efficient algorithm called S2D2, which outputs a defense strategy. We demonstrate the efficacy of S2D2 in extensive experiments on data from 80 real cities, improving the performance of the defender in comparison to greedy heuristics based on prior works. We prove that under some reasonable assumptions about the city structure, S2D2 outputs an approximate Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium (SSE) with a convenient structure.