Optimal network protection against diverse interdictor strategies

The objective of this paper is to provide optimal protection configurations for a network with components vulnerable to an interdictor with potentially different attacking strategies. Under this new setting, a solution/configuration describes the defender’s optimal amount of defense resources allocated to each link against a potential interdictor strategy. Previous to this research decisions were of a binary nature, restricted to defend or not. Obtaining these configurations is important because along with describing the protection scheme, they are also useful for identifying sets of components critical to the successful performance of the network. The application of the approach can be beneficial for networks in telecommunications, energy, and supply chains to name a few. To obtain an optimal solution, the manuscript describes an evolutionary algorithm that considers continuous decision variables. The results obtained for different examples illustrate that equal resource allocation is optimal for the case of homogeneous component vulnerability. These findings are the basis for discussion and for describing future research directives in this area.