No abstract

Recently, many studies have analyzed critical infrastructure vulnerability under spatially localized attack (SLA), which is modeled as the failure of a set of infrastructure components, distributed in a spatially localized area, due to malicious attacks, while other components outside of the area do not directly fail. However, existing studies have only considered one single attack area, and multiple SLAs (MSLAs) with more than one attack area have been seldom investigated. This article addresses this issue and studies vulnerability mitigation of critical infrastructure systems (CISs) against the worst‐case MSLAs. The problem is mathematically formulated as a tri‐level defender‐attacker‐defender model, the exact solution of which is solved by a proposed decomposition algorithm. Case studies on the adapted IEEE 24 bus system and the power transmission systems in Shelby County and Harris County, U.S., indicate that (1) system vulnerability under 2*M localized attack areas might be much larger than two times of the vulnerability under M localized attack areas; (2) small preevent defense investment might mitigate the worst‐case vulnerability by more than 40%; and (3) MSLAs might cause larger vulnerability than nonproximity‐based malicious attacks.