False Targets vs. Protection in defending Parallel Systems against Unintentional and Intentional Impacts

This article considers a parallel system exposed to external intentional impacts caused by malicious attacks, and unintentional impacts caused by natural disasters or technological accidents. The defender distributes its resource between the deployment of false targets and the protection of genuine system elements. The deployment of false targets is intended to misinform the attacker so that it is not able to distinguish between the false targets and the genuine system elements, which leads to dissipating the attack resources. Different combinations of unintentional and intentional impacts sequences are considered. The vulnerability of each system element is determined by an attacker-defender and unintentional impact-defender contest success functions. A framework of solving the optimal defense resource distribution which minimizes the overall system vulnerability is suggested. Illustrative examples are presented.