In this article, the issue of guarding multi-agent systems against a sequence
of intruder attacks through mobile heterogeneous guards (guards with different
ranges) is discussed. The article makes use of graph theoretic abstractions of
such systems in which agents are the nodes of a graph and edges represent
interconnections between agents. Guards represent specialized mobile agents on
specific nodes with capabilities to successfully detect and respond to an
attack within their guarding range. Using this abstraction, the article
addresses the problem in the context of eternal security problem in graphs.
Eternal security refers to securing all the nodes in a graph against an
infinite sequence of intruder attacks by a certain minimum number of guards.
This paper makes use of heterogeneous guards and addresses all the components
of the eternal security problem including the number of guards, their
deployment and movement strategies. In the proposed solution, a graph is
decomposed into clusters and a guard with appropriate range is then assigned to
each cluster. These guards ensure that all nodes within their corresponding
cluster are being protected at all times, thereby achieving the eternal
security in the graph.Comment: American Control Conference, Chicago, IL, 201
