Towards Addressing Spatio - Temporal Aspects in Security Games by Fei Fang

Game theory has been successfully used to handle complex resource allocation and patrolling problems in security and sustainability domains. More specifically, real-world applications have been deployed for different domains based on the framework of security games, where the defender (e.g., security agency) has a limited number of resources to protect a set of targets from an adversary (e.g., terrorist). Whereas the first generation of security games research provided algorithms for optimizing security resources in mostly static settings, my thesis advances the state-of-the-art to a new generation of security games, handling massive games with complex spatio-temporal settings and leading to real-world applications that have fundamentally altered current practices of security resource allocation. Indeed, in many real-world domains, players act in a geographical space over time, and my thesis is then to expand the frontiers of security games and to deal with challenges in domains with spatio-temporal dynamics. My thesis provides the first algorithms and models for advancing key aspects of spatio-temporal challenges in security games, including (i) continuous time; (ii) continuous space; (iii) frequent and repeated attacks; (iv) complex spatial constraints. First, focusing on games where actions are taken over continuous time (for example games with moving targets such as ferries and refugee supply lines), I propose a new game model that accurately models the continuous strategy space for the attacker. Based on this model, I provide