Software Assistants for Randomized Patrol Planning for the LAX Airport Police and the Federal Air Marshal Service

TLDR

Terrorism threats and limited security resources create exploitable patrol patterns, making randomized security policies essential to counter adversaries. The paper introduces ARMOR and IRIS, tools that help police and marshals randomize checkpoints, patrol routes, and flight schedules. These tools use efficient Bayesian Stackelberg game solvers to generate randomized checkpoint placements, canine patrol routes, and marshal flight schedules.

Abstract

The increasing threat of terrorism makes security at major locations of economic or political importance a major concern. Limited security resources prevent complete security coverage, allowing adversaries to observe and exploit patterns in patrolling or monitoring, and enabling them to plan attacks that avoid existing patrols. The use of randomized security policies that are more difficult for adversaries to predict and exploit can counter their surveillance capabilities. We describe two applications, ARMOR and IRIS, that assist security forces in randomizing their operations. These applications are based on fast algorithms for solving large instances of Bayesian Stackelberg games. Police at the Los Angeles International Airport deploy ARMOR to randomize the placement of checkpoints on roads entering the airport and the routes of canine unit patrols within the airport terminals. The Federal Air Marshal Service has deployed IRIS in a pilot program to randomize the schedules of air marshals on international flights. This paper examines the design choices, information, and evaluation criteria that were critical to developing these applications.