Metaheuristic approaches to the placement of suicide bomber detectors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cotta, Carlos, Gallardo, José E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cotta, Carlos
Gallardo, José E.
author_facet Cotta, Carlos
Gallardo, José E.
contents Suicide bombing is an infamous form of terrorism that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the current era of global terror warfare. We consider the case of targeted attacks of this kind, and the use of detectors distributed over the area under threat as a protective countermeasure. Such detectors are non-fully reliable, and must be strategically placed in order to maximize the chances of detecting the attack, hence minimizing the expected number of casualties. To this end, different metaheuristic approaches based on local search and on population-based search are considered and benchmarked against a powerful greedy heuristic from the literature. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on synthetic instances featuring very diverse properties. Most metaheuristics outperform the greedy algorithm, and a hill-climber is shown to be superior to remaining approaches. This hill-climber is subsequently subject to a sensitivity analysis to determine which problem features make it stand above the greedy approach, and is finally deployed on a number of problem instances built after realistic scenarios, corroborating the good performance of the heuristic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_18593
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Metaheuristic approaches to the placement of suicide bomber detectors
Cotta, Carlos
Gallardo, José E.
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Suicide bombing is an infamous form of terrorism that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the current era of global terror warfare. We consider the case of targeted attacks of this kind, and the use of detectors distributed over the area under threat as a protective countermeasure. Such detectors are non-fully reliable, and must be strategically placed in order to maximize the chances of detecting the attack, hence minimizing the expected number of casualties. To this end, different metaheuristic approaches based on local search and on population-based search are considered and benchmarked against a powerful greedy heuristic from the literature. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation on synthetic instances featuring very diverse properties. Most metaheuristics outperform the greedy algorithm, and a hill-climber is shown to be superior to remaining approaches. This hill-climber is subsequently subject to a sensitivity analysis to determine which problem features make it stand above the greedy approach, and is finally deployed on a number of problem instances built after realistic scenarios, corroborating the good performance of the heuristic.
title Metaheuristic approaches to the placement of suicide bomber detectors
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18593