Regional Capabilities Performance Assessment for Homeland Security

It is standard practice within most U.S. regions and locales to mobilize publicly-funded resources to respond to and recover from the effects of potentially harmful events afflicting their citizens. This paper proposes the use of fuzzy systems to characterize the relationship between the performance of regional risk mitigation capabilities (e.g., response and recovery) and the potential for loss attributed to plausible initiating events. In particular, the 37 capabilities described in the Department of Homeland Security´s Target Capabilities List v2.0 are leveraged to develop an approximate functional relationship between their individual effectiveness and their collective ability to reduce risk. The details of this model are described and demonstrated via a simple example.