A Unified Framework for Joint Sensor Placement and Scheduling for Intrusion Detection

2026-06-17

AI Summary

This study addresses the joint optimization of sensor placement and orientation scheduling to minimize the probability of undetected intruder traversal through a protected area. The problem is decomposed into a master–subproblem structure: orientation scheduling is formulated as a defender–attacker zero-sum game, whose Nash equilibrium is efficiently computed and used as the utility function for placement optimization. The work introduces a unified framework that, for the first time, integrates game-theoretic utility design with weak submodular optimization, offering theoretical guarantees on convergence and approximation optimality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves near-optimal detection performance while substantially reducing computational overhead compared to existing baselines.

Abstract

We consider an intrusion detection task in which a defender must jointly optimize sensor placement locations and orientations to minimize the probability of missed detection of an intruder traversing a protected environment. We decompose this problem into a meta problem, termed SensorPlacement, and an embedded subproblem, termed OrientationScheduling. The OrientationScheduling subproblem, for a fixed sensor placement, is modeled as a 2-player zero-sum game between the defender and the intruder, where the defender seeks an orientation strategy for the deployed sensors to minimize the probability of missed detection, while the intruder seeks a path selection strategy to maximize it. Since the defender's strategy space grows combinatorially with the number of sensors and orientations, solving the game via standard linear programming becomes prohibitive. To this end, we develop an iterative and efficient equilibrium-seeking algorithm that exploits the structure of the game's payoff function and establishes theoretical guarantees for convergence to the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game. This NE value is then used as a utility measure in the SensorPlacement meta problem. We show that this game-value-based utility function is weakly submodular over the set of sensor placements and propose a greedy placement algorithm with near-optimality guarantees. To our knowledge, this is the first unified framework to integrate game-theoretic utility design with (weak) submodular optimization, enabling principled joint optimization of sensor placement and orientation scheduling. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves near-optimal detection performance while significantly reducing computation time compared to baselines.

Problem

• sensor placement
• orientation scheduling
• intrusion detection
• zero-sum game
• missed detection probability

Innovation

• joint sensor placement and scheduling
• zero-sum game
• Nash equilibrium
• weak submodularity
• game-theoretic optimization