Multi-plant Protection: A Game-Theoretical Model for Improving Chemical Clusters Patrolling

Abstract

Due to economies of scale and all kinds of collaboration benefits, chemical plants are usually geographically clustered, forming chemical industrial parks or so-called ‘chemical clusters’. Some examples of such clusters are the Antwerp port chemical cluster in Belgium, the Rotterdam port chemical cluster in the Netherlands, the Houston chemical cluster in the US, or the Tianjin chemical cluster in China. Besides fixed security countermeasures within every plant, the patrolling of security guards is also scheduled, for securing these chemical facilities at different points and times, e.g. at night. The patrolling can either be single-plant oriented, which can be completely scheduled by the plant itself, or it can be multiple-plants oriented, which should be scheduled by an institute at a higher level than the single-plant level, for instance a multiple plant council (MPC) [1] Both types of patrolling have a drawback of not being able to deal with intelligent attackers. Some patrollers follow a fixed patrolling route, and in this case the adversary is able to predict the patroller’s position at a certain time. Other patrollers purely randomize their patrolling, without taking into consideration the hazardousness level that each installation/facility/plant holds, and if this is the case, the adversary may focus to attack the most dangerous installations/facilities/plants since all installations/facilities/plants are equally patrolled.

This chapter is mainly based on the paper of Zhang and Reniers [6]