5th Annual
Conference
Mathematical Methods in Counterterrorism
Abstracts
Bioterrorism Risk Probabilistic Risk Analysis
Barry Charles Ezell
Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC)
Old Dominion University
Abstract:
For more than thirty years, probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) has been
a major tool for assessing risks and informing risk management
decisions by government and businesses in areas as diverse as
industrial safety, environmental protection, and medical decision
making (see, for example, Kaplan and Garrick, 1981; Garrick, 1984;
Bedford and Cooke, 2001; Bier and Cox, 2007; Pate-Cornell, 2007). The
more recent application of PRA to bioterrorism risks is new however,
and not uncontroversial (Parnell et al., 2008). The National Research
Council on Methodological Improvements to the Department of Homeland
Security's Biological Agent Risk Analysis has argued that because of
the adaptive nature of the terrorist adversary, alternative tools like
decision trees, game theory, and agent-based modeling are needed to
assess the risks of terrorist events and that PRA is not valuable. In
this talk, we take a broad view of PRA, including any probabilistic
approach involving tools like event trees, fault trees, decision
trees, and influence diagrams. We make two points: 1) PRA is useful to
quantify terrorism risk; 2) event trees can help to decompose the
universe of terrorism scenarios.