HW3: Security Circumvention Games

For this homework you will build an airport security simulation loosely based on the model presented in GUARDS-Game Theoretic Security Allocation on a National Scale. We simplify their model by using only a few simple types of security circumvention techniques but also extend it by taking into account the effects that extra screening has on passenger waiting times.

Your model will have a passenger breed of agent. Each tick corresponds to a minute. The number of passengers that arrive each minute is given by random-poisson 1, a Poisson arrival rate of mean 1. Each passenger has random 3 luggage items with him, where luggage is also a breed. When a passenger arrives he is at the Boarding Pass area of the airport.


There are five areas in the airpot: Boarding Pass (B), Luggage (L), Security scan (S), Gate (G), and Plane (P). The passengers will traverse these in the order, B-S-G-P, while the luggage goes B-L-P.


At each tick the earliest random-poisson 1 turtles to arrive (smallest who) passenger or luggage that is not currently being screened in each area is moved to the next area. When there are 30 passengers and their luggage in P then they leave (die).


Each passenger is really a terrorist with probability terrorist-prob (a slider from 0 to 0.1). Each terrorist can carry out an attack of one of three types: 1, 2, 3. Also, he will do it in one of the areas (B,L,S,G,P) (if L then consider his luggage agent as the one that will perform the attack). The terrorist activates his attach 10 minutes after reaching his target area.


There are also 5 screener agents. The user has the choice of where to place each screener agent and which type of attack they screen for. That is, each screener is at one of the locations and can only identify one type of attack. Use 10 dropdown boxes to let the user pick which area (B-L-S-G-P) and which attack (1-2-3) to give each screener. At each time tick each screener randomly chooses a passenger/luggage in his area and screens him. If the agent is a terrorist with the same attack as the screener then he is marked as caught and removed. Every screening takes random-exponential 5 minutes, during this time the agent being screened cannot move to the next area.


Your simulation will let the user choose which types of screeners to put where and will then simulate a whole day (24 hours) of activity, keeping track of how many terrorists are successful and how many planes take off without incident (if 10 minutes go by on a full plane then it was OK, you can delete all those agents).  This simulation forms the first part of the homework.


In the original GUARDS paper, the terrorists are assumed to know where the screeners are placed. For the second part you will change the behavior of the terrorists so they know where the screeners are placed, and their type, and calculate their best response given this knowledge. In our simplified game this simply means that your terrorists should set their type of attack to be the one that is less often used by the screeners.

This homework is due Monday, October 10 @9am.