Research Summaries

Back A Robust Approach for Budgeting Effect Chains

Fiscal Year 2017
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Szechtman, Roberto
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Similarly to an effect-chain, the resilience of an effect-web is determined by its weakest links. However, migrating from a single thread to multiple possibly interconnected threads generates a modeling and implementation challenge. Some links (steps) may be common to several threads and thus may become more critical than others for the mission as a whole. On the other hand, a link may be specialized to only a certain unique thread but critical for the successful implementation of the corresponding mission. Given a budget, the question is: where to allocate the resilience-enhancing dollars? The answer depends on the weight (importance) of the missions corresponding to the various chains, the commonality of a links among effect-chains, and the cost of hardening a link. Initially we will formulate a deterministic optimization model for the aforementioned problem. In a second phase we will incorporate uncertainties associated with battlefield effects and enemy's actions. This will result in a stochastic optimization model. While a naïve for this problem typically does not lead to significant insights, due to the curse of dimensionality, we will adopt ideas of robust optimization (see, for example, Bandi and Bertsimas (2012)), to guarantee a lower bound performance with certain probability. Such models are much more tractable, from the computational standpoint, than fully fledged stochastic optimization models. Our approach will be rooted in game theory and attacker-defender ideas, and will build upon some of our earlier work (Carlyle et al., 2011).
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal