Grant: Engage Grants Program

There are a number of ways that nuclear facilities may assess the effectiveness and vulnerabilities of physical protection systems at nuclear facilities. Approaches include expert opinion, simulation, force-on-force exercises and real engagements. Real engagements with adversaries give actual data, but are rare events and therefore of low statistical significance. Force-on-force (blue team/red team) exercises can yield high quality data about security system effectiveness, however they are extremely expensive to conduct and can lead to human factor problems. Expert opinion can provide directed assessment which is highly subjective in nature and is not capable of assessing actual performance. Simulation has the advantages of being able to provide relatively low-cost statistically significant data regarding physical protection system effectiveness, estimation of adversary sequencing and response force neutralization of adversary. Physical protection at nuclear facilitiesinclude a complex blend of physical barriers, sensor technologies and human security components. This research, undertaken with the industrial partner Presagis, will be to provide a toolkit consisting of physical protection detection system and barriers that may be inserted into their synthetic environmental simulation tool (STAGE13) to allow for realistic force-on-force simulations on nuclear facilities. This will allow explicit investigation of adversary interruption and provide statistical data necessary to calculate probability of neutralization for given force-on-force scenarios.