2023/02/20 by Si Wei Feng, Feng, Si Wei, Jingjin Yu +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Engineering · #Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis #Protein Degradation and Inhibitors #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.09706
openalex publication_date 2023/02/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper studies the problem of defending (1D and 2D) boundaries against a large number of continuous attacks with a heterogeneous group of defenders. The defender team has perfect information of the attack events within some time (finite or infinite) horizon, with the goal of intercepting as many attacks as possible. An attack is considered successfully intercepted if a defender is present at the boundary location when and where the attack happens. Through proposing a network-flow and integer programming-based method for computing optimal solutions, and an exhaustive defender pairing heuristic method for computing near-optimal solutions, we are able to significantly reduce the computation burden in solving the problem in comparison to the previous state of the art. Extensive simulation experiments confirm the effectiveness of the algorithms. Leveraging our efficient methods, we also characterize the solution structures, revealing the relationships between the attack interception rate and the various problem parameters, e.g., the heterogeneity of the defenders, attack rate, boundary topology, and the look-ahead horizon.