Defense and attack of performance-sharing common bus systems

This paper studies the defense and attack strategies for a system with a common bus performance-sharing mechanism that is subject to intentional attacks. The performance-sharing mechanism allows any surplus performance of a component to be transmitted to other components in the system via the common bus. A practical example of such a system is the power system. The system may fail due to internal causes, such as component degradation, as well as intentional attacks, such as acts of terrorism. The defender allocates its resources to maximize the system's reliability by protecting the common bus and the components. The attacker allocates its resources to minimize the system's reliability by attacking the common bus and the components. We propose a framework to model both the reliability and the defense-attack contest for a general common bus system. Based on this framework, we investigate the optimal defense and attack strategies for a system with identical components in a two-stage min-max game.