VMASC Research Used in Recent DHS Preparedness Toolkit

April 2012

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The Department of Homeland Security’s Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment Guide Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (201 Supplement 1: Toolkit First Edition April 2012) features in the first few pages an article by VMASC researchers - Probabilistic Risk Analysis and Terrorism Risk (originally published in Risk Analysis. Volume 30, Number 4, pp. 575–589. 2010).

Used as an important DHS reference, this article describes a number of existing and potential approaches to terrorism risk analysis, with particular attention to the application of probabilistic risk analysis. The authors, VMASC researchers Barry Ezell, John Sokolowski and Andrew Collins as well as Steven Bennett and Detlof von Winterfeldt, explore a number of existing and potential approaches for terrorism risk analysis, focusing particularly on recent discussions regarding the applicability of probabilistic and decision analytic approaches to bioterrorism risks and the Bioterrorism Risk Assessment methodology used by the DHS and criticized by the National Academies and others.


The DHS Guide particularly touts “Tools for Terrorism Risk Analysis,” a section within the article that presents three categories of tools unique to probabilistic risk analysis that should be applied to terrorism risk, including logic trees, influence diagrams, systems dynamics models, game theory models, and Bayesian networks.

The original article can be accessed here:
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/rma-risk-assessment-technical-publication.pdf