MICHIGAN ENGINEERING SERVICES LLC — Department of Homeland Security SBIR Phase II: 19.OATS-002

Description

DHS is preserving the safety and the security of America by preventing, foiling, and defeating attacks from a variety of adversaries. The increasing threats (both in terms of numbers and in terms of abilities) must be addressed successfully while facing an austere budget environment. In order to be able to "do more with less" having a capability for optimizing the resources and the assets which are utilized for mounting a defense against adversarial attacks and maximizing the effectiveness of the defense while minimizing the associated cost is of paramount importance. This project will develop an Attack-Defense Decision Support Toolkit based on work completed under contract W911QX-14-C-0065 for optimizing allocation of resources and performance for complex military systems. The new tool will offer guidance on how to best select the hardware (i.e. barriers, vehicles, drones, etc.) and the software (i.e. sensors, artificial intelligence, etc.) components of a defensive structure, in order to best harden the defense for the lowest utilization of resources. The new capability will be flexible for modeling any attack-defense scenario while considering adversaries of variable capabilities. It will be easy to use so that non-expert users can gain meaningful results and insights. It will analyze a large number of defense scenarios efficiently and provide pertinent information to stakeholders and decision makers. There is significant commercialization potential in the areas of private security; for hardening the defense of Government buildings, airports, sport venues, etc.; in planning against new cyber-security threats; and in selecting and organizing assets for space defense.