Chapter Abstracts

Chapter 1 - Page 3 (Thorisson and Lambert)

On the "Influence of Scenarios to Priorities" in Risk and Security Programs

Organizations increasingly follow comprehensive guidelines and standards when implementing programs for the assessment and management of risk, safety, resilience, or security. Programs often involve the coordination of multiple systems, of stakeholders and organizational units, and require balancing different needs and missions, as well as being flexible and having the ability to withstand and adjust to emerging conditions of economics, policies, military conflict, environment, and other factors. This chapter suggests three canonical questions as the mission of such a program: (i) what sources of risks are to be managed by the program; (ii) how should multiple risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication activities be administered and coordinated, and what should be the basis for resource allocation to these activities; and (iii) how will the performance of the program be monitored and evaluated. An approach to evaluate how different components of a program comply with guidelines and how various risk scenarios influence the priorities of the program is demonstrated. Thus, it emphasizes the preparedness of programs whose priorities adjust to emergent conditions of technology, environment, demographics, markets, regulations, organizations, and geography. The methods presented are useful to organizations and agencies implementing risk guidelines for security, infrastructure, finance, logistics, emergency management, resilience, and preparedness.

Chapter 2 - Page 25 (Maya, Liu, Zhu, Tran, Creighton and Woo)

Survey of Risk Analytic Guidelines Across the Government

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been developing its guidance for standardizing risk analyses practices to facilitate high quality, data fidelity, utility of results, and appropriate consistency for the analyses performed by DHS's broad spectrum of operational components and offices. In this chapter, the authors review such guidance as used across non-DHS agencies in the US government, as well as select international sources. To achieve this, they surveyed areas of relevance to analyses for the homeland security enterprise, and performed a systematic overview of the content of these guidelines. Finally, they examined how different organizations and guidelines address methodological challenges in qualitative and quantitative national level integrated risk assessments, and senior level risk assessments for decision-making. The results are presented by agency in a manner that facilitates the comparative review of the extant guidance from multiple sources related to specific areas of risk assessment and management.

Chapter 3 - Page 69 (Chatterjee, Brigantic and Waterworth)

An Overview of Risk Modeling Methods and Approaches for National Security

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) defines risk as the "potential for an adverse outcome assessed as a function of threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences associated with an incident, event, or occurrence." National security risk analyses are conducted across a spectrum of threats, such as nuclear terrorism to pandemic diseases. These analyses often rely on historical data and/or data derived from simulation or expert judgment to quantify and model the various elements of risk. This chapter focuses on the evolution of DHS's definition of the elements of security risk, i.e. threat, vulnerability, and consequence. An overview of the modeling methods and approaches typically adopted for characterizing these risk components is also presented..

Chapter 4 - Page 101 (Lundberg)

Comparative Risk Rankings in Support of Homeland Security Strategic Plans

Prioritizing homeland security risks at the strategic level starts with a need to understand which risks are worse than others. This is particularly challenging, as not only are there a diverse set of hazards to consider, with deep uncertainty in their likelihood and consequence, but bringing together the multiple aspects of consequence involves an inherent subjectivity. One useful approach is the Deliberative Method for Ranking Risks, a structured method to solicit informed comparative risk rankings. This chapter will outline an illustration of the Deliberative Method for Ranking Risks applied to a set of 10 hazards strategically important to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Using a sample of the lay public, the method is found to be reliable and produces more analytical consideration of risks than ad hoc consideration of risk.

Chapter 5 - Page 125 (Fortin, Johansen, Chatterjee, Muller and Noonan)

A Data Science Workflow for Discovering Spatial Patterns Among Terrorist Attacks and Infrastructure

Terrorism continues to plague nations around the globe. Decision-makers and analysts need data-driven tools to help them gain insight into terrorist groups, uncover trends, and quantify the risk of terrorist attack. We introduce an interactive data visualization application to explore incidents of terror at user-specified spatial and temporal levels using data from the Global Terrorism Database. The application allows a user to view historical terrorist activity on an interactive world map, with features that allow filtering and visualization in multiple forms. Additionally, we discuss a statistical modeling approach to determine the relationship between terrorist attacks and types of infrastructure within a country using zero-inflated models for count data. The modeling framework is demonstrated using case studies on terrorist attack data from Libya and the Jammu and Kashmir region in India. The models are able to identify statistically significant infrastructure variables, as well as identify specific regions of interest for further investigation by analysts.

Chapter 6 - Page 153 (Shan and Zhuang)

Effects of Credibility of Retaliation Threats in Deterring Smuggling of Nuclear Weapons

The prevalence of global supply chains demands speediness of freights moving across borders between nations. However, nuclear weapon smuggling still poses a significant risk to the United States, which requires a trade-off between cargo inspection and speedy transition. Retaliation threats and partial inspection could be used together to effectively deter such smuggling attempts. As a nontechnical version of Shan and Zhuang (2014a), this chapter models credibility of retaliation threats against smuggling of nuclear weapons within the context of an attacker-defender game and find that a rational defender would not always carry out retaliation activities under the condition that i) the reputation loss from non-credible retaliation threats is low, ii) the reward for carrying out retaliation is low, or iii) the retaliation costs too much. In addition, we study the required inspection level in order to deter smuggling of nuclear weapons when the retaliation threats are non-credible. This research highlights the importance of studying the credibility of retaliation threats in attacker-defender interactions, as well as provides some insights on strategic integration of partial inspection and retaliation threats in deterring nuclear smuggling.

Chapter 7 - Page 171 (Bier and Liu)

Disutility of Mass Relocation After a Severe Nuclear Accident

Health effects following nuclear accidents may be dominated by the societal disruption of mass relocation. Since relocation can lead to physical, psychological, and economic impacts, tradeoffs between fatalities and relocation is an important topic of study. This chapter presents multiple disutility models accounting for cancer fatalities and relocation. Results of an economic analysis based on direct economic costs of relocation are also discussed.

Chapter 8 - Page 193 (DeGregory and Ganesan)

Scheduling Federal Air Marshals Under Uncertainty

Approximate dynamic programming (ADP), the modern approach for effectively handling both sequential decision-making under uncertainty (stemming from risk) and the scalability problem long associated with traditional dynamic programming, is becoming more prevalent in academia and industry. Extant literature provides many examples of how the transportation industry has embraced ADP, particularly in the airline and trucking sectors, which demand critical decisions in the face of uncertainty, such as scheduling of personnel, allocation of scarce resources, and capital investment. In particular, the chapter describes one application in detail on the dynamic allocation of Federal Air Marshals (a case that addresses Department of Homeland Security's mission to prevent terrorism and enhance security), and, in general, outlines the necessary components for successful modeling and implementation of ADP as it pertains to the homeland security frontier. The intent is to motivate researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to explore and consider ADP as a viable technique in solving the most complex decision-making problems facing homeland security.

Chapter 9 - Page 223 (McCarthy, Sinha, Tambe and Manadhatha)

Decision Theory for Network Security: Active Sensing for Detection and Prevention of Data Exfiltration

We address a major challenge in cyber security, detecting and addressing advanced persistent...