Image Credit: Pexels.com

The increasing threat of climate change and natural disasters, alongside the pressing threat of cyber-attacks and increasingly advanced technology raises the question: how can we protect our cities against unpredictable disasters? A UBCO professor has the answers and he used an unconventional strategy to find them.

UBCO Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Amin Ahmadi Digehsara and Assistant Professor Dr. Amir Ardestani-Jaafari have been working on a new research project that aims to protect major city networks by using a classic gaming strategy.

“Our project actually recognized the essential role of major infrastructure in everyday life and the economy,” Dr. Ahmadi Digehsara told iNFOnews.ca. “My goal is to safeguard these systems, particularly the nodes or the links that we have.”

“Nodes” refer to the important infrastructure in a city, such as medical centres or energy facilities and “links” are physical networks such as roads and highways, or non-physical networks like the internet.

Dr. Ahmadi Digehsara’s research looks at the different scenarios that could put these systems at risk, resulting in a hefty cost to the city, health safety risks or all out chaos.

These attacks can come in many different forms, Dr. Digehsara explained. From natural disasters such as the 2020 floods in British Columbia, to hacking attempts on internet lines and bank systems.

“These attacks, as you can see in nature, they are unpredictable. There is always a level of uncertainty about the exact location of the attack and severity,” he said. “So, in this case, we need to find which links or which nodes… we need to protect more because they are more important.”

In order to tackle the spontaneous nature of the of these attacks, Dr. Digehsara used a popular gaming tactic.

“It's a very famous game in the game theory context. It's a defender-attacker-defender game,” he said.

The game works using three players. Player one is the primary defender. Their jobs is to protect the network nodes and links without any prior knowledge of the attack.

Player two is the attacker. They attack a network in any way they like, be it natural disaster or a human attack to the non-physical systems.

The third player works as an inner defender and tries to find a path in the network to deliver essential items, important data or emergency supplies to different regions.

Dr. Digehsara said he learned about the game during his masters studies and realized its relevancy to everyday life.

By playing the game repeatedly, Dr. Digehsara said they were able to develop different helpful strategies as well as discover weak-points in real-world city networks.

“We developed many, many strategies in the paper for different attack scenarios and we did our fortification plan for the worst-case attack scenario,” he said.

The strategy also promises a versatile method to help cities adapt to ever-changing and developing threats. 

“This isn’t a one-time effort. As threats change and our networks grow, it is important to keep adapting and improving the response," Dr. Ardestani-Jaafari said in a press release. "In simple terms, we’re like the guardians of the city’s lifelines, working behind the scenes to make sure everyone can continue living their lives with minimal disruption, no matter what surprises come our way.” 

More information about the study can be found on the UBCO website here.

To contact a reporter for this story, email Georgina Whitehouse or call 250-864-7494 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. SUBSCRIBE to our awesome newsletter here.

News from © iNFOnews, 2023