Improving Homeland Security Decisions

About the book: What are the risks of terrorism and what are their consequences and economic impacts? Are we safer from terrorism today than before 9/11? Does the government spend our homeland security funds well? These questions motivated a twelve-year research program of the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. This book showcases some of the most important results of this research and offers key insights on how to address the most important security problems of our time. Written for homeland security researchers and practitioners, this book covers a wide range of methodologies and real-world examples of how to reduce terrorism risks, increase the efficient use of homeland security resources, and thereby make better decisions overall.

Table of Contents: 

1. Introduction. Improving homeland security decisions Ali E. Abbas, Milind Tambe and Detlof von Winterfeldt 

2. Probability risk analysis and terrorism risk Barry Charles Ezell, Steven P. Bennett, Detlof von Winterfeldt and John Sokolowski 

3. Integrating stakeholder values into strategic planning through comparative risk analysis Henry H. Willis and Russell Lundberg 

4. Validating terrorism risk assessment models – lessons learned from eleven models John Lathrop and Barry C. Ezell 

5. Coping with uncertainty in adversarial risk analysis Vicki Bier and Tony Cox 

6. A risk and economic analysis of dirty bomb attack on the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach Heather Rosoff and Detlof von Winterfeldt 

7. Regional transportation modelling for homeland security Maged Dessouky, Fernando Ordóñez, Zhihong Shen and Hongzhong Jia 

8. Economic consequences of terrorism and natural disasters: the computable general equilibrium approach Peter B. Dixon, Maureen T. Rimmer, Glyn Wittwer, Adam Z. Rose and Nathaniel Heatwole 

9. Economic resilience to terrorism and natural disasters Adam Rose 

10. The regional economic impacts of hurricanes Katrina and Rita on oil refinery operations in the Gulf of Mexico Jiyoung Park, Peter Gordon, Yunkyung Kim, James E. Moore II and Harry W. Richardson 

11. Benefit-cost analysis and risk Scott Farrow 

12. Enhancing post-disaster economic resilience: public-private partnership for insuring terrorism Howard Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-Kerman 

13. Economic impacts of changes in wait times at US ports of entry Bryan Roberts, Adam Rose, Nathaniel Heatwole, Dan Wei, Misak Avetisyan, Fynnwin Prager, Charles Baschnagel and Isaac Maya 

14. Organizational decision processes Gregory S. Parnell and Barry C. Ezell 

15. A value model for evaluating homeland security decisions Ralph L. Keeney and Detlof von Winterfeldt 

16. Identifying, structuring, and comparing the objectives of Al Qaeda and Isil Johannes Siebert and Greg Keeney 

17. Models of multi-objective decision making Ali E. Abbas 

18. Achieving multiple objectives with limited resources using utility theory and control theory Ali E. Abbas and Dušan M. Stipanović 

19. Defender-attacker decision tree analysis to combat terrorism Detlof von Winterfeldt 

20. Decision making for bioterror preparedness: example from smallpox vaccination policy Edward H. Kaplan and Lawrence M. Wein 

21. Stackelberg security games (sgg) basics and application overview Bo An, Milind Tambe and Arunesh Sinha 

22. Basic solution concepts and algorithms for Stackelberg security games Christopher Kiekintveld and Manish Jain 

23. Mixed integer optimization methods for solving Stackelberg security games William B. Haskell and Fernando Ordóñez 

24. Methods for addressing the unpredictable real-world element in security Jinshu Cui, Thanh H. Nguyen, James Pita and Richard S. John 

25. Learning to play Stackelberg security games Avrim Blum, Nika Haghtalab and Ariel D. Procaccia 

26. Evaluating deployed decision support systems for security: challenges, analysis, and approaches Matthew E. Taylor, Christopher Kiekintveld, Eric Shieh, Francesco Delle Fave and Milind Tambe 

27. Homeland security resource allocation games considering partially strategic attackers and equity Xiaojun Shan and Jun Zhuang 

28. Decision analysis by proxy for adaptive adversaries Richard S. John and Heather Rosoff 

29. Asymmetric prescriptive/descriptive game theory for counter-terrorism Jason R. W. Merrick and Philip Leclerc 

30. Near-misses and decision making under uncertainty in the context of cybersecurity Robin L. Dillon and Catherine H. Tinsley.