Robust Operations

Operations under malicious attack are usually studied in a very narrow context. The typical example is in the context of point-to-point communication networks in a graph. The question is whether after k nodes have been destroyed, each remaining node can continue communicating to any remaining one. The topic was generalized to (1) secure distributed computation (secure multiparty computation); (2) secure communication, further generalized to the case of partial broadcast; (3) AND/OR graphs requiring minimal flows after the attack. In this paper we broaden these topics to robust operations in general. We give several examples, such as the robust multiple knapsack, and the robust traveling salesman. We give a general definition.