Risk based framework for critical decision making

Risk analysis is a science of understanding and quantifying the probability of the occurrence(s) of undesirable event(s). Traditionally, risk assessments have been concerned with the management of safety based incidents. Recent attacks on chemical facilities in the Middle East and Northern Africa illustrate the need to broaden the risk management mindset. This body of work proposes quantitative barrier-based methodologies to assist management of broad-based decision-making processes. This research began by exploiting concepts from security-based research accompanied with a barrier-based methodology from safety research through both fault and event trees. This work expands into mapping the trees onto Bayesian Networks to manipulate the conditional probability table of intermediate variables. This manipulation allows for the implementation of various relaxation assumptions. Case studies accompany each proposed approach to illustrate its execution. The goal of this work is to raise awareness of quantitative security based methodologies and to assist in critical decision-making.