Defending Critical Infrastructure

By Gerald G. Brown, M. Carlyle, Javier Salmerón, Kevin Wood. Interfaces, 2006

822 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We apply new bilevel and trilevel optimization models to make critical infrastructure more resilient against terrorist attacks. Each model features an intelligent attacker (terrorists) and a defender (us), information transparency, and sequential actions by attacker and defender. We illustrate with examples of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the US Border Patrol at Yuma, Arizona, and an electrical transmission system. We conclude by reporting insights gained from the modeling experience and many “red-team” exercises. Each exercise gathers open-source data on a real-world infrastructure system, develops an appropriate bilevel or trilevel model, and uses these to identify vulnerabilities in the system or to plan an optimal defense.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3da5323468ddc57f8be3aa5fd293f19500432f3b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Civil and Structural Engineering

1. Jianhui Wang
2. Milind Tambe
3. Kalyanmoy Deb
4. Melissa Dell
5. Aldis Jakubovskis

In Control and Systems Engineering

1. Jianhui Wang
2. Kalyanmoy Deb
3. Feng Qiu
4. Chongqing Kang
5. Pekka Malo
6. Ankur Sinha
7. Yaoyao Liu
8. Qianru Sun

In Statistics and Probability

1. Milind Tambe
2. Bo Zeng
3. Chongqing Kang
4. Kalyanmoy Deb
5. Melissa Dell
6. Jianhui Wang

Citations in the corpus

• A Review on Bilevel Optimization: From Classical to Evolutionary Approaches and Applications (2017, background): “5) Defense Applications: Bilevel optimization has a number of applications in the defense sector [30], for example attacker–defender Stackelberg games [9], [34], [85], [125], [131], [132], [137].”
• Adversarial Risk Analysis (2009, background): “ARA with alternating moves is also treated in Brown et al. (2006) and Brown, Carlyle, and Wood (2008), who consider not only Defend-Attack scenarios, but also Attack-Defend and Defend-Attack-Defend cases.”
• Playing games for security: an efficient exact algorithm for solving Bayesian Stackelberg games (2008, background): “Stackelberg games are commonly used to model attacker-defender scenarios in security domains [2], as well as in patrolling [12], and could potentially be used in many other situations such as network routing [10], pricing in transportation systems [4], setting up security checkpoints and other adver”
• Deployed ARMOR protection: the application of a game theoretic model for security at the Los Angeles International Airport (2008, background): “[3] do specifically apply Stackelberg games for defending critical infrastructure.”
• Trafficking Networks and the Mexican Drug War (2015, background): “Brown et al. (2006) examine how networks can be made less vulnerable to attack by terrorists, and Goyal and Vigier (2010) develop a related model where a designer chooses a network and an attacker chooses an attack strategy.”
• Robust Optimization-Based Resilient Distribution Network Planning Against Natural Disasters (2016, methodology): “Here we use a cardinality budget set similar to the budget sets used in hardening transmission networks [3], [4], [6], [7].”