GUARDS - Game Theoretic Security Allocation on a National Scale
J Pita, M Tambe, C Kiekintveld, S Cullen, E Steigerwald
In Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011).
This is the author's version of the work.
It is posted here by permission of IFAAMAS for personal use, not for redistribution.
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Abstract
Building on research previously reported at AAMAS conferences,
this paper describes an innovative application of a novel gametheoretic
approach for a national scale security deployment. Working
with the United States Transportation Security Administration
(TSA), we have developed a new application called GUARDS to
assist in resource allocation tasks for airport protection at over 400
United States airports. In contrast with previous efforts such as ARMOR
and IRIS, which focused on one-off tailored applications and
one security activity (e.g. canine patrol or checkpoints) per application,
GUARDS faces three key issues: (i) reasoning about hundreds
of heterogeneous security activities; (ii) reasoning over diverse potential
threats; (iii) developing a system designed for hundreds of
end-users. Since a national deployment precludes tailoring to specific
airports, our key ideas are: (i) creating a new game-theoretic
framework that allows for heterogeneous defender activities and
compact modeling of a large number of threats; (ii) developing
an efficient solution technique based on general purpose Stackelberg
game solvers; (iii) taking a partially centralized approach for
knowledge acquisition and development of the system. In doing so
we develop a software scheduling assistant, GUARDS, designed to
reason over two agents - the TSA and a potential adversary -
and allocate the TSA's limited resources across hundreds of security
activities in order to provide protection within airports.
The scheduling assistant has been delivered to the TSA and is
currently under evaluation and testing for scheduling practices at
an undisclosed airport. If successful, the TSA intends to incorporate
the system into their unpredictable scheduling practices nationwide.
In this paper we discuss the design choices and challenges
encountered during the implementation of GUARDS. GUARDS
represents promising potential for transitioning years of academic
research into a nationally deployed system.
