Citation

Ben Yaghlane A, Azaiez MN. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 2017; 258(3): 1156-1164.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ejor.2016.09.041

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the concept of system survivability under attack in analogy with system reliability. The problem is very important particularly nowadays when the world witnesses a large variety of intelligent threats including terrorism, rebellions, civil wars, pirating, and so on. We limit consideration to the discrete case. We define a component/system survivability to be the probability that the system/component continues functioning upon attack. We specify the differences between our suggested concept of system survivability and the traditional one of system reliability. Most often, the survivability follows a Bernoulli distribution for which the survival probability is derived based on the system configuration. We develop results for series, parallel, series-parallel, parallel-series and k-out-of-n systems. We also provide the expected number of attacks for each system configuration based on the particular attack strategy both for single and multiple attacks. We illustrate the process through a real application.

Language: en

Keywords

Decision analysis; Defense/attack strategies; Discrete attacks; Reliability; System survivability