Stackelberg Security Games with Multiple Uncoordinated Defenders

Stackelberg security games have received much attention in recent years. While most existing work focuses on single-defender settings, there are many real-world scenarios that involve multiple defenders (e.g., multi-national anti-crime actions in international waters, different security agencies patrolling the same area). In this paper, we consider security games with uncoordinated defenders who jointly protect a set of targets, but may have different valuations for these targets; each defender schedules their own resources and selfishly optimizes their own utility. We generalize the standard (single-defender) model of Stackelberg security games to this setting and formulate an equilibrium concept that captures the nature of strategic interaction among the players. We argue that an exact equilibrium may fail to exist, and, in fact, deciding whether it exists is NP-hard. However, under mild assumptions, every multi-defender security game admits an ε-equilibrium for every ε>0$, and the limit points corresponding to ε\to 0$ can be efficiently approximated.