Prioritizing and Scheduling Safeguards and Security Upgrade Projects Under Restricted Budgets

Safeguards and security upgrade projects are selected to meet a variety of disparate, sometimes conflicting, concerns that have been identified by vulnerability studies and other reviews. Trade-offs must frequently be made regarding project selection and scheduling. This paper describes a two-phase, quantitative methodology that explicitly addresses the trade-offs between competing safeguards objectives, and selects and schedules safeguards upgrade projects in a manner that ensures that the maximum benefit is realized within time and budget constraints. In the first phase, a multiattribute preference model is developed to provide a quantitative measure of the relative values that management places on meeting different objectives. In the second phase, an optimization model is used to select and schedule upgrade projects in the most effective manner with respect to the priorities specified in the preference model. The optimization model can accommodate complex relationships among upgrades projects and safeguards objectives that are not captured by simple ranking schemes.