Intelligent border patrol route optimization

Illegal cross-border activity has become a major concern in homeland defense and security. Because of the limitation of patrolling resource and budget, it seams very meaningful to do research on how to dispatch resources appropriately. The research on this area has been developed by many researches and experts. This thesis focuses on border patrol route optimization. Game theory is introduced to make patrol route "intelligent", where border patrol agents are considered as defenders and infiltrators are considered as attackers. The attackers' goal is to enter the target country successfully while defenders intend to capture attackers to prevent illegal cross-border activities. A strictly mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in a two-player game is applied. The proposed methodology may help border patrol agents to find the optimal route and have a higher chance to catch the infiltrators. At last, the decision for setting checkpoints and choosing patrolling route is made by defenders according to the optimization results generated by Matlab. Three case studies will be conducted to demonstrate the validity of the proposed methodology and related results will be discussed to show the advantages of the model.