APE: An Anti-poaching Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Benchmark
Résumé
Widespread poaching threatens many endangered species today, requiring
robust strategies to coordinate ranger patrols and effectively deter poachers
within protected areas. Recent research has modelled this problem as a
strategic game between rangers and poachers, resulting in anti-poaching
becoming a popular application domain within game theory and multi-
agent research communities. Unfortunately, the lack of a standard open-
source implementation of the anti-poaching game hinders the reproducibility
and advancement of current research in the field. This paper aims to
fill this gap by providing the first open-source standardised environment
for the anti-poaching game. Our contributions are as follows: (1) we
formalise anti-poaching as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game; (2) we
provide the Anti-Poaching Environment (APE), an open-source Python
implementation of a simulator for this game using the PettingZoo API,
which is compatible with many existing multi-agent reinforcement learning
(MARL) libraries; and (3) we illustrate how to apply deep reinforcement-
learning algorithms from the RLlib library, in order to compute cooperative
and cooperative-competitive equilibria of APE instances. Our project is
published at https://forgemia.inra.fr/chip-gt/antipoaching.