Date of Award

9-15-2016

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Gary B. Lamont, PhD.

Abstract

Game theory is used to model conflicts between one or more players over resources. It offers players a way to reason, allowing rationale for selecting strategies that avoid the worst outcome. Game theory lacks the ability to incorporate advantages one player may have over another player. A meta-game, known as a hypergame, occurs when one player does not know or fully understand all the strategies of a game. Hypergame theory builds upon the utility of game theory by allowing a player to outmaneuver an opponent, thus obtaining a more preferred outcome with higher utility. Recent work in hypergame theory has focused on normal form static games that lack the ability to encode several realistic strategies. One example of this is when a player’s available actions in the future is dependent on his selection in the past. This work presents a temporal framework for hypergame models. This framework is the first application of temporal logic to hypergames and provides a more flexible modeling for domain experts. With this new framework for hypergames, the concepts of trust, distrust, mistrust, and deception are formalized. While past literature references deception in hypergame research, this work is the first to formalize the definition for hypergames. As a demonstration of the new temporal framework for hypergames, it is applied to classical game theoretical examples, as well as a complex supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) network temporal hypergame. The SCADA network is an example includes actions that have a temporal dependency, where a choice in the first round affects what decisions can be made in the later round of the game. The demonstration results show that the framework is a realistic and flexible modeling method for a variety of applications.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENG-DS-16-S-070

DTIC Accession Number

AD1054268

Comments

Nicholas Kovach is a 2019 recipient of AFIT's Young Alumni Award, established to recognize alumni who have made outstanding contributions in their career within 10 years of graduating from AFIT. The award recognizes the exceptional professional accomplishments in their professional life, community affairs, and support of the advancement and continued excellence of AFIT.

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