Airport vulnerability assessment-a methodology evaluation

This paper presents the results of an evaluation of several different approaches to conducting quantitative airport vulnerability and risk assessment. Field tests of seven methodologies applied to a total of thirteen major US domestic airports provided the results and reports used to evaluate the various methodologies. The process of evaluation used a rigorous decision technology approach, which involves evaluation criteria, several different weighting schemes, and computation of the overall desirability value for each methodology. The evaluation criteria will be identified and the final results presented. Additional insight into the types of automation demonstrated in the project will also be provided. This discussion leads to an identification of several levels of automated tool sophistication, from simple calculators to artificial intelligence application. Overall analysis of the airport vulnerability assessments generated trends in terms of commonly identified security upgrades. Prioritized security upgrade categories are derived based on their frequency of occurrence in these analyses. This paper concludes with a discussion of the FAA's plans and approach to establishing standard airport assessment methods throughout the US domestic airports. Automated tool development and refinement initiatives are presented, along with on-going verification program plans and results.