Preventing Illegal Logging:
Simultaneous Optimization of Resource Teams and Tactics for Security
(S. McCarthy, M. Tambe, C. Kiekintveld, M. Gore, A. Killion)
In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2016.
This is the author's version of the work.
Download
Abstract
Green security - protection of forests, fish
and wildlife - is
a critical problem in environmental sustainability. We focus
on the problem of optimizing the defense of forests against
illegal logging, where often we are faced with the challenge
of teaming up many different groups, from national police to
forest guards to NGOs, each with differing capabilities and
costs. This paper introduces a new, yet fundamental problem:
Simultaneous Optimization of Resource Teams and Tactics
(SORT). SORT contrasts with most previous game-theoretic
research for green security - in particular based on security
games – that has solely focused on optimizing patrolling tactics,
without consideration of team formation or coordination.
We develop new models and scalable algorithms to apply
SORT towards illegal logging in large forest areas. We
evaluate our methods on a variety of synthetic examples, as
well as a real-world case study using data from our on-going
collaboration in Madagascar.
