Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to develop a decision-making framework intended to for selecting the optimal strategy for the protection of an infrastructure considered critical. As infrastructure management is a problem of complexity management, the preferred approach was employing a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, specifically the Analytic Hierarchy Process technique. Based on the main interactions and processes involved in infrastructure management, a set of 6 criteria was proposed to establish the decision space. A panel of 5 experts provided pairwise comparisons as inputs for the AHP application from which priorities and weighs were derived. To validate the framework, consistency tests were performed as well as a consensus indicator was calculated to determine whether mathematically consolidating the opinions is representative for the individual inputs. The results obtained provide sufficient confidence for validating the model as a trustworthy starting point in a decision process.