How Do We Mitigate Against a Marauding Terrorist?

Abstract

In recent years, worldwide terrorist strategy has changed from long term plan- ning and high impact attacks, to relatively short-term planning, ’marauding’ attacks. In other words, terrorist attacks from 2010 to present have often consisted of a small number of terrorists in densely populated public spaces actively searching out people to maim and kill with weapons that are har- der to regulate, such as knives and vehicles, with little regard for their own survival. This begs the question, therefore, of how we mitigate against these ’marauding terrorists’. If we assume 3 different types of actors: Public, Ter- rorists, and Responders, and assume the strategy of the Terrorists is to kill as many people as possible before they themselves are killed, how can the strategies of the Public and Responders (police, bouncers etc.) be optimised to minimise loss of life?
In this report, the problem at hand and important information are compiled before 3 approaches to model a terrorist attack in a public space are considered - a Particle Model, a Discrete Network Model, and a Game Simulation model. Whilst this is by no means a complete list of possible models of a terrorist attack, these were believed to be models that could be developed the most in a week at the ESGI130 at the University of Warwick. For each model type, we first consider their assumptions and suitability to the problem, then model the scenario. Finally, we consider possible extensions to each model, and also how they may be used to evaluate the most effective strategies of the Public and Responders given the information available to them at any one time.