A Generic Metaheuristic Approach to Sequential Security Games

The paper introduces a generic approach to solving Sequential Security Games (SGs) which utilizes Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). Formulation of the method (named EASG) is general and largely game-independent, which allows for its application to a wide range of SGs with just little adjustments addressing game specificity. Experiments performed on $3$ different types of games (with 300 instances in total) demonstrate robustness and stability of EASG, manifested by repeatable achieving optimal or near-optimal solutions in the vast majority of the cases. The main advantage of EASG is time efficiency. The method scales better than state-of-the-art approaches and can be applied to sequential SGs with bigger numbers of steps compared to the existing methods. Due to anytime characteristics, EASG is very well suited for time-critical applications.