Toward Intelligent Decision Support for Security Staff: Evaluation of an Interactive Resource Management System Based on a CMDP Model

The officer-in-charge deploying the security personnel to protect a large infrastructure meets a complex decision problem if multiple threats have to be handled simultaneously: Limited surveillance resources have to be optimally allocated to the many affected sectors in order to provide the safest threat state for the infrastructure as a whole over time. This contribution presents an interactive resource management system providing decision support for optimally deploying surveillance resources. For this purpose, the user interface displays a risk map of the infrastructure’s current threat situation together with a recommendation of the currently optimal resource allocation. Thereby, the resource allocation recommendation is obtained by solving a CMDP model of an infrastructure’s global threat situation. An evaluation of the CMDP-based decision support shows that displaying both resource allocation recommendation and risk map enables the participants to handle threat scenarios more cost-saving, and additionally causes less workload and higher acceptance among the participants.