GUARDS: game theoretic security allocation on a national scale

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 m...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: James Pita, Milind Tambe, Christopher Kiekintveld, Shane Cullen, Erin Steigerwald
• Keywords: ATAL 2011, Canine Patrol, Intelligent Agents, National Deployment, Transportation Security Administration