The ARMOR, developed in Israel, protects sensitive sites in the U.S.

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

A system developed in Bar Ilan University in Israel helps to protect sites in the U.S. against terror.

The Department of Homeland Security has a software product called ARMOR, the Assistant for Randomized Monitoring Over Routes, which calculates optimum patrol patterns.

Various versions of ARMOR have been used over the last six years by the Coast Guard to randomize patrols, by the Federal Air Marshal Service to protect the most at-risk flights, and to determine the location of checkpoints and canine patrols at Los Angeles International Airport.

It is currently being evaluated by the Transportation Security Administration and Los Angeles Metro train security, while the U.S. Navy has now expressed interest in using ARMOR for anti-piracy patrols. DHS believes it would also be useful to the U.S. Army and Air Force for tasks such as scheduling surveillance drone flights.

ARMOR is superior to the old way of scheduling patrols, said lead ARMOR researcher Milind Tambe, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California and a researcher at DHS’ National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, or CREATE, at USC.

i-HLS ISRAEL Homeland Security 

“Patrols were scheduled either by humans or they rolled dice to choose,” Tambe said.

The heart of ARMOR is game theory, that branch of mathematical/statistical thinking that has much to do with cold logic and very little to do with how real human beings play games. Or more specifically, Stackelberg theory, in which one player moves first and the other players can observe that move before making their own.

The goal is to allocate limited defensive resources in an environment where some targets are more important than others, and where there is an asymmetry of information — namely, in that the defender doesn’t know where and when the attacker will strike, but the attacker can conduct long-term surveillance to discover gaps in the defenses.

Los Angeles International Airport is a prime target for terrorists, who would like nothing more than to perpetrate a major attack on the West Coast of the United States. Now, breaking through the airport’s antiterrorism defenses has been made significantly harder

The Armor has been developed in a joint program headed by  researchers from the University of Southern California and Prof. Sarit Kraus, an expert in artificial intelligence from the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University.