Preventing Illegal Logging: Simultaneous Optimization of Resource Teams and Tactics for Security

Green security – protection of forests, fish and wildlife – is a critical problem in environmental sustainability. We focus on the problem of optimizing the defense of forests against illegal logging, where often we are faced with the challenge of teaming up many different groups, from national police to forest guards to NGOs, each with differing capabilities and costs. This paper introduces a new, yet fundamental problem: Simultaneous Optimization of Resource Teams and Tactics (SORT). SORT contrasts with most previous game-theoretic research for green security – in particular based on security games – that has solely focused on optimizing patrolling tactics, without consideration of team formation or coordination. We develop new models and scalable algorithms to apply SORT towards illegal logging in large forest areas. We evaluate our methods on a variety of synthetic examples, as well as a real-world case study using data from our on-going collaboration in Madagascar.