Coordinated defender strategies for border patrols

International audienceAn effective patrol of a large area can require the coordinated action of diverse security resources. In this work we formulate a Stackelberg Security game that coordinates such resources in a border patrol problem. In this security domain, resources from different precincts have to be paired to conduct patrols in the border due to logistic constraints. Given this structure the set of pure defender strategies is of exponential size. We describe the set of mixed strategies using a polynomial number of variables but exponentially many constraints that come from the matching polytope. We then include this description in a mixed integer formulation to compute the Strong Stackelberg Equilibrium efficiently with a branch and cut scheme. Since the optimal patrol solution is a probability distribution over the set of exponential size, we also introduce an efficient sampling method that can be used to deploy the security resources every shift. Our computational results evaluate the efficiency of the branch and cut scheme developed and the accuracy of the sampling method. We show the applicability of the methodology by solving a real world border patrol problem

A study of general and security Stackelberg game formulations

International audienceIn this paper, we analyze different mathematical formulations for general Stackelberg games (GSGs) and Stackelberg security games (SSGs). We consider GSGs in which a single leader commits to a utility maximizing strategy knowing that one of p possible followers optimizes its own utility taking this leader strategy into account. SSGs are a type of GSG that arise in security applications where the strategies of the leader consist in protecting subsets of targets and the strategies of the p followers consist in attacking a single target. We compare existing mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations for GSGs, sorting them according to the tightness of their linear programming (LP) relaxations. We show that SSG formulations are projections of GSG formulations and exploit this link to derive a new SSG MILP formulation that i) has the tightest LP relaxation known among SSG MILP formulations and ii) its LP relaxation coincides with the convex hull of feasible solutions in the case of a single follower. We present computational experiments empirically comparing the difficulty of solving the formulations in the general and security settings. The new SSG MILP formulation is computationally efficient, in particular as the problem size increases