Failure Propagation and Reliability Degradation in Maritime Kill Webs with Multi-Domain Heterogeneous Function-Carrying Platforms

Abstract

Maritime kill webs integrate heterogeneous platforms across air, surface, and underwater domains, with each platform potentially supporting multiple mission functions. Existing reliability models often represent attacks as complete node removals and therefore cannot distinguish overall platform failures from local functional degradation or quantify reliability losses caused by cross-domain coordination. This study develops a two-layer platform–function model and a probabilistic attack-response mechanism that couples platform-level and function-level damage. Multi-domain adaptation coefficients are introduced to modify functional-edge reliability, and system degradation is assessed using functional-node retention, structural closure, effective closure, and mission reliability retention. In a simulation containing 24 platforms, 55 functional nodes, and 15,246 candidate kill chains, targeted attacks caused substantially greater mission degradation than random attacks. At a cumulative attacked-platform ratio of 0.25, mission reliability retention was 0.5340 under random attack, compared with 0.2173 and 0.2184 under degree-based and functional-carrier-prioritized attacks, respectively. Under functional-carrier-prioritized attack, reliability loss was greatest for underwater targets (0.869). Sensitivity and ablation analyses showed that local functional degradation strongly affects retained mission reliability, while multi-domain adaptation mainly affects whether structurally closed chains satisfy the mission-reliability requirement. The proposed framework distinguishes structural disruption from reliability-induced mission interruption in multilayer mission systems.