Title: Qualitative criteria in the assessment of security measures for critical infrastructure protection - a new approach

Authors: Peter Klein; Reinhard Hutter

Addresses: CESS GmbH, Osterwaldstraße 57, 80805 München, Germany ' CESS GmbH, Osterwaldstraße 57, 80805 München, Germany

Abstract: Besides the needs to reduce financial risks and to use budgets in a cost-efficient way, decisions over security measures to protect critical infrastructures are often driven by factors which are not expressible in money or other numerical units, including political appropriateness, privacy violations, fears concerning environmental impacts, and many others. Methods for multi-criteria decision analysis such as the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) have long been used to support decision-making dealing with such qualitative criteria, yet have received little attention in the field of critical infrastructure protection. Building on the AHP, this paper develops a new, simple and reliable method - the MAHP - to assess and compare critical infrastructure protection measures with regard to qualitative criteria.

Keywords: MAHP; analytic hierarchy process; AHP; multi-criteria decision analysis; MCDA; critical infrastructure; critical infrastructure protection; CIP; qualitative criteria; security measures.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2017.083637

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2017 Vol.13 No.1, pp.29 - 45

Received: 22 Jan 2016
Accepted: 27 Aug 2016
Published online: 13 Apr 2017 *

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