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Metaheuristic approaches to the placement of suicide bomber detectors

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Abstract

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 (such as a hill climber, different Greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, an evolutionary algorithm and several estimation of distribution algorithms) 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.

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Fig. 1

Source own elaboration based on data from Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) (2016) (Color figure online)

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Notes

  1. Note that the attacker following a non-shortest path would in principle imply a larger exposure to detection and hence this assumption provides a baseline for evaluation, and is used too in related contexts such as routing military ground operations (Kim et al. 2016). Also, according to the literature on modeling realistic human walking paths, there seems to be a governing principle which is minimizing the time-derivative of the curvature of the path (Arechavaleta et al. 2008). This mostly affects those cases in which a turn has to be made, resulting in clothoid-like trajectories. Notice however that this effect may be minor in light of factors such as the discretization of the map and the presence of obstacles (such as, e.g., street walls) constraining the trajectory.

  2. These instances are publicly available—see the “Appendix” for details.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mr. Antonio Hernández Bimbela for his help during the initial stage of this project, and to the anonymous reviewers for useful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071, Málaga, Spain

    Carlos Cotta & José E. Gallardo

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  1. Carlos Cotta
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  2. José E. Gallardo
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Correspondence to Carlos Cotta.

Additional information

Authors acknowledge support from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) under project EphemeCH (TIN2014-56494-C4-1-P).

Appendix: A data instances

Appendix: A data instances

The data instances used in the experimentation can be downloaded from:

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Cotta, C., Gallardo, J.E. Metaheuristic approaches to the placement of suicide bomber detectors. J Heuristics 24, 483–513 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-017-9335-z

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