Identification of critical locations across multiple infrastructures for terrorist actions

This paper discusses a possible approach to ranking geographic regions that can influence multiple infrastructures. Once ranked, decision makers can determine whether these regions are critical locations based on their susceptibility to terrorist acts. We identify these locations by calculating a value for a geographic region which represents the combined values to the decision makers of all the infrastructures crossing through that region. These values, as well as the size of the geographic regions, are conditional on a minor destructive threat of a given size, e.g,. a bomb that can affect objects within 15 feet of it. This approach first requires an assessment of the users of the system. During this assessment, each user is assigned a performance index (PI) based on the disutility of the loss of each infrastructure's resource via multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT). A Monte Carlo network analysis is then performed to develop importance measures (IM) for the elements of each infrastructure for their ability to service each user. We combine the IMs with the user PIs to a value that we call valued worth (VW) for each infrastructure's elements independently.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Patterson, Sean A. (Sean Albert), 1981-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• George E. Apostolakis.

• Nuclear Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34445

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34445