Game theoretic vulnerability analysis for the optimal defense of high speed rail

High-speed rail (HSR) holds promise as an investment to modernize our country´s transportation infrastructure and serve as a driver for our national economy. The five-hundred billion dollar price tag necessitates thorough analysis and planning upfront to ensure long-term success, including a well formulated vulnerability analysis to identify an optimal strategy for deploying protective technologies and infrastructure that will render the HSR network resilient to disruptions induced by natural disasters and terrorist threats. This paper embeds a game theoretic vulnerability assessment technique that considers the impact of defending the links of the network on network vulnerability into a genetic algorithm, which searches for the optimal assignment of finite defensive resources to the links of the network. The approach is applied to the incremental HSR network deployment map given by the U.S. High Speed Rail Association, describing network construction over a fifteen year period from 2015 to 2030.