On evaluation of patrolling and signalling schemes to prevent poaching in green security games

Abstract

Illegal poaching poses threat to the natural ecosystem, hastens the extinction of animal species, and disrupts forestry and other natural resources. Countries usually deploy security personnel to protect these resources from poachers. However, preservation of such resources is oftentimes hindered by the lack of manpower of concerned agencies. Green security, a discipline that leverages the game theoretic concepts to assist human patrols has recently emerged to mitigate this problem. Over the past few years, a good number of studies have been conducted on various aspects of such security systems including poachers’ behavior modeling, optimal patrolling route generation, and signalling mechanisms to assist guards. In this paper, we contribute to the literature in the following three ways. First, we offer a radio signalling scheme to assist human guards. Second, we introduce two concepts regarding the guarding patterns: (a) the concept of “boundedness” is coined which limits the patrolling area of human guards and (b) the concept of “move skipping” is put forth which is to compulsorily abstain from moving at some timesteps while patrolling. Third, we investigate the required number of deployed drones to achieve an effective monitoring. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes have the capability to reduce poaching occurrences, while, at the same time, decrease over-patrolling and fuel usage. Our research focuses on analyzing and comparing different variations of a green security game setup. In our research, we analyze and compare these different aspects of various patrolling patterns and based on our findings, we provide useful insights that contribute to the development of the research field of green security and security schemes in general, including both human patrols and drones, which are deployed to prevent poachers or adversaries from poaching resources.

Keywords

• Wildlife Preservation
• Poaching Prevention
• Game Theory
• Security Games
• Green Security
• Mechanism Design