Locating Facilities Under Deliberate Disruptive Attacks

Facility disruptions or failures may occur due to natural disasters or a deliberate man-made attack. Such an attack is known as interdiction. Recently, facility location problems, addressing intentional strikes against operating facilities and strategies to reduce their impact, have received particular attention. In this paper, we present a new location-interdiction median problem aimed at designing a distribution network which is robust to the worst-case, long-term facility losses. We suppose that there are two players: defender (system designer) and attacker. The defender decides where to locate facilities to minimize the overall cost of supplying the demands of customers. The attacker determines which r facilities to interdict to maximize the cost of serving the customers from the remaining operational facilities. Note that we suppose that the facilities are attacked simultaneously and interdicted facilities become unavailable. We propose bilevel and single-level integer formulations of this problem. For a particular case when the attacker hits a single facility, we develop a fast local search procedure based on implicit enumeration of interdiction strategies. We test our approaches in a series of computational experiments on well-known test problems.