Protection vs. redundancy in homogeneous parallel systems

The article considers defense resource allocation in a system exposed to external intentional attack. The defender distributes its resource between deploying redundant elements and their protection from attacks. The attacker distributes its effort evenly among all of the elements or among elements from a chosen subset. The vulnerability of each element is determined by an attacker-defender contest success function. The expected damage caused by the attack is evaluated as system unsupplied demand. The article considers both the cases without and with performance redundancy. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.