Effective defense against chemical and biological threats requires an "end-to-end" strategy that encompasses the entire problem space, from threat assessment and target hardening to response planning and recovery. A key element of the strategy is the definition of appropriate system requirements for surveillance and detection of threat agents. Our end-to-end approach to venue chem/bio defense is captured in the Facilities Weapons of Mass Destruction Decision Analysis Capability (FacDAC), an integrated system-of-systems toolset that can be used to generate requirements across all stages of detector development. For example, in the early stage of detector development the approach can be used to develop performance targets (e.g., sensitivity, selectivity, false positive rate) to provide guidance on what technologies to pursue. In the development phase, after a detector technology has been selected, the approach can aid in determining performance trade-offs and down-selection of competing technologies. During the application stage, the approach can be employed to design optimal defensive architectures that make the best use of available technology to maximize system performance. This presentation will discuss the end-to-end approach to defining detector requirements and demonstrate the capabilities of the FacDAC toolset using examples from a number of studies for the Department of Homeland Security.

Date Published: 5 May 2009
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7306, Optics and Photonics in Global Homeland Security V and Biometric Technology for Human Identification VI, 730607 (5 May 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.820141

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7306:
Optics and Photonics in Global Homeland Security V and Biometric Technology for Human Identification VI
B.V.K. Vijaya Kumar; Craig S. Halvorson; Šárka O. Southern; Salil Prabhakar; Arun A. Ross, Editor(s)