Securing transportation of hazardous materials against terrorism: A novel game-based approach

Abstract

Hazardous materials (hazmat) transportation is a classical problem of significance in operations research, safety science, and related areas. Ever since 9/11, terrorism becomes an ongoing hotspot issue all over the world, in particular, for megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, New York, among others. In this document, we address a hazardous materials transportation problem that is subject to a threat of terrorist attack. To solve this problem, we propose a systematic risk management method based on game theory that allows us to identify the defense strategy that mitigates the impact of an eventual attack on the urban transport network. To do this, we first establish a mathematical model to identify the key urban roads (edges) of the transportation network that could be the target of a terrorist attack. Second, we introduce a new comprehensive risk index system to clarify the key edges in four risk scenarios. Third, we model government agencies responsible for security and terrorists as a two-person, non-zero game, to study their different attack-defense strategies for different risk scenarios. Finally, we take a real road network in Beijing city as an example to illustrate the effectiveness of our method. Both the method and the results proposed in our article can provide a good understanding of how to solve problems similar to the one studied in this article.