Risk Informed Decision Framework for Integrated Evaluation of Countermeasures against CBRN Threats

In this paper, we describe an approach to rank a set of terrorism-related countermeasures. The proposed methodology is particularly useful when the set of countermeasures have to be evaluated against different combinations of terrorist attack methods and targets. We refer to this approach as the Risk Informed Decision Framework (RIDF), which integrates three independent methodologies – Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), Risk Analysis (RA) and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). As we demonstrate through a terrorism case study, RIDF is not data intensive and it uses a breadth of decision criteria. The criteria are flexible and the required data is available from pre-existing studies or high level qualitative judgments. Given these characteristics, the RIDF approach is responsive to some guidelines from the National Research Council (NRC) regarding countermeasure evaluation. We utilize a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) terrorist threat, as described in the National Planning Scenarios (NPS) and countermeasures which were based on the Target Capabilities List (TCL) as an example.