Object defence of a single object with preventive strike of random effect

Abstract Most existing research on system defence is restricted to passive measures such as providing redundancy, protecting system elements, and deploying false elements. Some recent works have considered the launching of preventive strikes, where a preventive strike, if successful, destroys all the attacker's resources. However, in practice, a preventive strike might cause a random loss to the attacker's resources. This paper assumes that the destroyable attacking resources follow a Poisson distribution. Procedures are presented to solve the optimal defence strategies for three cases: (1) where preventive strikes and object protections are the only available defence measures; (2) where false targets can also be deployed, and they are perfect; and (3) where false targets can also be deployed, but they are imperfect. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the applications, and sensitivity analysis is employed to demonstrate the influence of parameters.