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

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.