Event
Mech Eng Seminar: Ahti Salo, Applications of Adversarial Risk Analysis in Defense
Friday, October 13, 2023
11:00 a.m.
2164 EGR, in-person only
Steven Gabriel
sgabriel@umd.edu
Applications of Adversarial Risk Analysis and Cross-Impact Analysis in Defence
Systems Analysis Laboratory Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis
Aalto University School of Science
Aalto, Finland
Abstract
Models of adversarial risk analysis (ARA) help address decision problems in which there are several players with conflicting objectives, and the role of the analyst is to support one of the players. This player may be, for example, the Defender who can take pre-emptive actions before the Attacker decides whether to proceed with an aggressive act. In such a setting, it is pertinent to explore how sensitive the ARA results are to alternative assumptions about the Attacker. Specifically, when the Defender considers what portfolio of pre-emptive actions should be implemented, it is instructive to determine all portfolios of actions that are non-dominated in view of the full range of plausible assumptions about the Attacker. A detailed examination of these portfolios helps reveal those actions that are robust, in the sense that they would be selected for all these assumptions. We illustrate this approach with a realistic case study on military planning.
We also present a case study in which probabilistic cross‐impact analysis was employed to explore the impacts of three‐dimensional (3D) printing on the Finnish Defense Forces. In this case study, leading technological and military experts were consulted to obtain cross-impacts statements about the interdependencies between eleven key uncertainty factors representing technological progress, industry growth, and standardization, among others. These statements were then employed as parameters in an optimization model to derive probability estimates for the joint probability distribution over all scenarios, defined as combinations of possible outcomes for these uncertainty factors. We highlight some of the insights that were suggested by this structured process of scenario analysis.
