A cooperative network interdiction model and its optimization solution algorithm

Service disruptions due to deliberate sabotage are serious threats to supply systems. To alleviate the loss of accessibility caused by such disruptions, identifying the system vulnerabilities that would be worth strengthening is a critical problem in the field of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). Today’s supply systems tend to be attacked in a cooperative manner. A set of facilities of an infrastructure system would be struck by several attackers cooperatively to create the worst-case disruptions. In this case, the conventional critical infrastructure protection approach based on R-Interdiction Median models with Fortification (RIMF) does not work well because it does not consider the cooperative manner among attackers. To handle the problem, a Bi-objective Probabilistic Interdiction Median Model with Cooperative Attacks (BICA) is proposed in this work. It is formulated as a bi-objective nonlinear optimization model and solved by a modified multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. Experiments verify the high interdiction losses of disruptions caused by cooperative attacks without any protection. Compared with the conventional model, the experimental results show that the BICA model can model the cooperative attacking problem effectively and that its evolutionary-based algorithm can solve the model efficiently.