Individual versus overarching protection against strategic attacks

This article considers a system consisting of elements that can be protected and attacked individually and collectively. To destroy the system, the attacker must always penetrate/destroy the collective (overarching) protection. In the case of the parallel system, it also must destroy all elements, whereas in the case of the series system, it must destroy at least one element. Both the attacker and the defender have limited resources and can distribute these freely between the two types of protection. The attacker chooses the resource distribution and the number of attacked elements to maximize the system destruction probability. The defender chooses the resource distribution and the number of protected elements to minimize the system destruction probability. The bi‐contest minmax game is formulated and its analytical solutions are presented and analysed. The asymptotical analysis of the solutions is presented. The influence of the game parameters on the optimal defence and attack strategies is discussed.