English

Security Games in Network Flow Problems

Computer Science and Game Theory 2019-01-23 v3 Systems and Control

Abstract

This article considers a two-player strategic game for network routing under link disruptions. Player 1 (defender) routes flow through a network to maximize her value of effective flow while facing transportation costs. Player 2 (attacker) simultaneously disrupts one or more links to maximize her value of lost flow but also faces cost of disrupting links. Linear programming duality in zero-sum games and the Max-Flow Min-Cut Theorem are applied to obtain properties that are satisfied in any Nash equilibrium. A characterization of the support of the equilibrium strategies is provided using graph-theoretic arguments. Finally, conditions under which these results extend to budget-constrained environments are also studied. These results extend the classical minimum cost maximum flow problem and the minimum cut problem to a class of security games on flow networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1601.07216,
  title  = {Security Games in Network Flow Problems},
  author = {Mathieu Dahan and Saurabh Amin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.07216},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

The results in this paper only hold under a restrictive assumption on the class of networks (Assumption 1 in page 7). This makes the results inapplicable in practice, and further work is needed

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:37:27.134Z