Title: Location of response facilities: a simultaneous game between state and terrorist

Authors: Oded Berman, Arieh Gavious, Rongbing Huang

Addresses: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6, Canada. ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Ben-Gurion University, P.O. Box 653, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel. ' School of Administrative Studies, York University, Atkinson Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada

Abstract: We study a simultaneous move game with two players: a terrorist and a state where the latter installs facilities that provide support in case of a terrorist attack. While the state installs the facilities such that the metropolitan area attacked is the one that minimises her disutility (i.e. minimises |loss|), the terrorist, who is not aware of the location of the facilities, attacks one of the metropolitan areas to maximise his utility. An analytic solution for some specific network structure is introduced. Numerically, we solve the problem for a case study of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the USA.

Keywords: facilities location; terrorists; game theory; simultaneous moves; simultaneous games; terrorism; response facilities; terrorist attacks; network structure; metropolitan areas; USA; United States; support facilities; state facilities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2011.037265

International Journal of Operational Research, 2011 Vol.10 No.1, pp.102 - 120

Published online: 14 Feb 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article