Determining the Optimal Location of Terror Response Facilities under the Risk of Disruption

The highly strategic nature of terrorist attacks has often frustrated attempts at locating emergency response facilities. To better determine the optimal location of such facilities, we present a leader-follower game between State and Terrorist by considering facility failures. The first stage of the game allows State to make a facility location decision and facility assignment to the attacked city, while the second stage allows Terrorist to select one city to attack after observing the State's strategy. The game is translated into a minmaxmin problem, and a population-based heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve it. We evaluate the performance of both model and heuristic by using an emergency example. Our results indicate that the proposed algorithm is able to generate suitable facility location solutions, allowing us to deploy resources more efficiently during a terrorist attack to where they are needed.