Meeting a demand vs. enhancing protections in homogeneous parallel systems

The article considers defense resource allocation in a system exposed to planned and forced losses. The defender distributes its limited resource between deploying identical system elements and their protection from attacks. Planned losses arise if there are not enough elements to meet the demand. Forced losses arise if an external attack reduces the performance below the demand. The attacker distributes its effort evenly among all 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 proportional to the system performance reduction below a planned level of demand satisfaction.