Abstract
Airports are attractive targets for terrorists, as they are designed to accommodate and process large amounts of people, resulting in a high concentration of potential victims. A popular method to mitigate the risk of terrorist attacks is through security patrols, but resources are often limited. Game theory is commonly used as a methodology to find optimal patrol routes for security agents such that security risks are minimized. However, game-theoretic models suffer from payoff uncertainty and often rely solely on expert assessment to estimate game payoffs. Experts cannot incorporate all aspects of a terrorist attack in their assessment. For instance, attacker behavior, which contributes to the game payoff rewards, is hard to estimate precisely. To address this shortcoming, we proposed a novel empirical game theory approach in which payoffs are estimated using agent-based modeling. Using this approach, we simulated different attacker and defender strategies in an agent-based model to estimate game-theoretic payoffs, while a security game was used to find optimal security patrols. We performed a case study at a regional airport, and show that the optimal security patrol is non-deterministic and gives special emphasis to high-impact areas, such as the security checkpoint. The found security patrol routes are an improvement over previously found security strategies of the same case study.
Highlights
Ever since the attacks on the World Trade Center, 11 September 2001, airports have significantly enhanced security operations, procedures, and checks
We investigate a scenario in which an attacker aims to detonate an improvised explosive device (IED) on a publicly accessible area of a regional airport, while security agents execute patrol routes in the airport terminal
The defender choice after leaving T3 is to go either to T2 or T0, and, eventually, staying there until a new patrol starts. These results can be explained by the fact that the attacker, in his path to T3, may be detected by the defender if she is either at check-in area 2 (T2 ) or the airport entrance (T0 ). These results show that the optimal security patrol gives special emphasis to high-impact areas, such as the security checkpoint, to reduce the total security risk
Summary
Ever since the attacks on the World Trade Center, 11 September 2001, airports have significantly enhanced security operations, procedures, and checks. Game theory provides a mathematical framework to study interactions between strategic and self-interested agents who maximize the effectiveness of their actions This makes it is appropriate to model adversarial reasoning for security resource allocation and scheduling problems [2]. Many security studies have focused on either agent-based modeling [10,11], or security games [3,12], combining both approaches to improve security-game payoffs has not been addressed To this end, we investigate a scenario in which an attacker aims to detonate an improvised explosive device (IED) on a publicly accessible area of a regional airport, while security agents execute patrol routes in the airport terminal. We use an agent-based model to determine the number of casualties of a terrorist attack and use these results to specify payoffs in a security game.
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