Adaptive and Dynamic Team Formation for Strategic and Tactical Planning

Abstract

Past work in security games has mainly focused on the problem static resource allocation; how to optimally deploy a given fixed team of resources. My research aims to address the challenge of integrating operational planning into security games, where resources are heterogeneous and the defender is tasked with optimizing over both the investment into these resources, as well as their deployment in the field. This allows the defender to design more adaptive strategies, reason about the efficiency of their use of these resources as well as their effectiveness in their deployment. This thesis explores the challenges in integrating these two optimization problems in both the single stage and multi-stage setting and provides a formal model of this problem, which we refer to as the Simultaneous Optimization of Resource Teams and Tactics (SORT) as a new fundamental research problem in security games that combines strategic and tactical decision making. The main contributions of this work are solution methods to the SORT problem under various settings as well as exploring various types of tradeoffs that can arise in these settings. These include managing budget for investment in resources as well as capacity constraints on use of resources. My work addresses scenarios when the tactical decision problem (optimal deployment) is difficult, and thus evaluating the performance of any given team is difficult. Additionally, I address domains where we are tasked with making repeated strategic level decision and where, due to changing domain features, fluctuations in time dependent processes or the realization of uncertain parameters in the problem, it becomes necessary to re-evaluate and adapt to new information.