A cost-beneficial area-partition-involved collaborative patrolling game in a large-scale chemical cluster

Abstract Terrorists often take the chemical clusters as the attacking target because of the adverse impacts of a chemical accident on society and the environment. In addition to some fixed countermeasures, previous studies have verified the feasibility of a patrol in addressing adversarial attacks. However, the previous patrolling practices fail to tackle the terrorist attacking problems in a large-scale area cost-effectively. To further tackle the protection issue with cost-beneficial solutions in a large-scale scenario, i.e., in a chemical cluster, we propose an area-partition-involved collaborative patrolling (APCP) game. We first leverage the proposed greedy deployment algorithm to determine the initial deployment of defenders (patrollers), including the quantity and position of patrol vehicles. Then, the large-scale area is partitioned into multiple smaller areas by using the collaborative idea of static partitioning. In the meantime, corresponding patrolling graphs are constructed based on graphic modeling methods. Finally, the APCP game is built between patrol vehicles (namely defender) and potential terrorists (namely attacker), in which patrol vehicles aim at detecting attack behaviors of terrorists by intelligently scheduling the patrolling routes. After formalizing the problem into a sequential game, we compute the Stackelberg equilibrium through the MultiLPs algorithm. Through case studies of three practical chemical cluster scenarios, the results explicitly show the superiority of our proposed APCP game by saving up to 25.48 % patrolling costs in a one-shot game compared to the results before partition. As for the collaborative patrolling problem in a large-scale area, the methods and models proposed in this paper can facilitate the management department of chemical clusters with intelligently scheduled patrolling routes, which can effectively reduce the cost of patrollers, and better protect the chemical cluster.