Security Games with Protection Externalities

Stackelberg security games have been widely deployed in recent years to schedule security resources. An assumption in most existing security game models is that one security resource assigned to a target only protects that target. However, in many important real-world security scenarios, when a resource is assigned to a target, it exhibits protection externalities: that is, it also protects other “neighbouring” targets. We investigate such Security Games with Protection Externalities (SPEs). First, we demonstrate that computing a strong Stackelberg equilibrium for an SPE is NP-hard, in contrast with traditional Stackelberg security games which can be solved in polynomial time. On the positive side, we propose a novel column generation based approach—CLASPE—to solve SPEs. CLASPE features the following novelties: 1) a novel mixed-integer linear programming formulation for the slave problem; 2) an extended greedy approach with a constant-factor approximation ratio to speed up the...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Jiarui Gan, Bo An, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
• Keywords: AAAI 2015, Intelligent Agents