Trade-Off Between Redundancy, Protection, and Imperfect False Targets in Defending Parallel Systems

A substantial amount of research over the past decades has studied the reliability of different systems, but most of them are restricted to systems with only internal failures. In practice, systems may fail due to unintentional impacts or intentional attacks. In this chapter, we first provide a comprehensive review of the research on improving system reliability. The survey shows that, for systems subject to intentional attacks, providing redundant system elements, protecting genuine elements, and deploying false targets are the three important measures to increase the system survivability. The trade-off between protecting genuine elements and deployment of imperfect false targets has been studied before, however, subject to a fixed number of genuine elements in the system. This chapter studies the trade-off between building redundant genuine elements, protection of genuine elements and deploying imperfect false targets in the defense of a capacitated parallel system. Numerical examples are carried out to illustrate the applications.