Optimal Scheduling of Agents in ADTrees: Specialised Algorithm and Declarative Models (2305.04616v2)

Abstract: Expressing attack-defence trees in a multi-agent setting allows for studying a new aspect of security scenarios, namely how the number of agents and their task assignment impact the performance, e.g. attack time, of strategies executed by opposing coalitions. Optimal scheduling of agents' actions, a non-trivial problem, is thus vital. We discuss associated caveats and propose an algorithm that synthesises such an assignment, targeting minimal attack time and using the minimal number of agents for a given attack-defence tree. We also investigate an alternative approach for the same problem using Rewriting Logic, starting with a simple and elegant declarative model, whose correctness (in terms of schedule's optimality) is self-evident. We then refine this specification, inspired by the design of our specialised algorithm, to obtain an efficient system that can be used as a playground to explore various aspects of attack-defence trees. We compare the two approaches on different benchmarks.