Dual-Mandate Patrols: Multi-Armed Bandits for Green Security

arXiv:2009.06560v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Conservation efforts in green security domains to protect wildlife and forests are constrained by the limited availability of defenders (i.e., patrollers), who must patrol vast areas to protect from attackers (e.g., poachers or illegal loggers). Defenders must choose how much time to spend in each region of the protected area, balancing exploration of infrequently visited regions and exploitation of known hotspots. We formulate the problem as a stochastic multi-armed bandit, where each action represents a …

abstract arxiv availability conservation cs.lg domains forests green multi-armed bandits protect security spend stat.ml type vast wildlife