Patrolling games with coordination between monitoring devices and patrols

Monitoring devices, as assistance devices for patrols, are being used more frequently in real patrol processes. The deployment of security resources requires full consideration of the coordination between monitoring devices and patrols to ensure a safe environment. The traditional approach to this problem is to deploy monitoring devices and patrols separately based on the evaluation of their respective defensive effect. This paper determines the distribution of monitoring devices and the scheduler of patrols by combining the impact of monitoring devices and patrols. The attack–defense game model is used to distribute monitoring devices and schedule patrols. We determine the optimal patrol strategy using the Markov reward process and game at each moment. The optimal patrol path is composed of the optimal patrol target at each moment, which reduces the number of strategies. The belief state of the partially observable Markov decision process is used to mitigate the issue of incomplete information in the game. The target at the entrance location is shown to be important, and the defender should not place important materials at the entrance.