Towards a Science of Security Games

Citation:

Thanh H. Nguyen, Debarun Kar, Matthew Brown, Arunesh Sinha, Albert Xin Jiang, and Milind Tambe. 2016. “Towards a Science of Security Games .” In New Frontiers of Multidisciplinary Research in STEAM-H (Book chapter) (edited by B Toni).

Abstract:

Security is a critical concern around the world. In many domains from counter-terrorism to sustainability, limited security resources prevent complete security coverage at all times. Instead, these limited resources must be scheduled (or allocated or deployed), while simultaneously taking into account the importance of different targets, the responses of the adversaries to the security posture, and the potential uncertainties in adversary payoffs and observations, etc. Computational game theory can help generate such security schedules. Indeed, casting the problem as a Stackelberg game, we have developed new algorithms that are now deployed over multiple years in multiple applications for scheduling of security resources. These applications are leading to real-world use-inspired research in the emerging research area of “security games”. The research challenges posed by these applications include scaling up security games to real-world sized problems, handling multiple types of uncertainty, and dealing with bounded rationality of human adversaries.
See also: 2016