ABSTRACT
Many large organizations accomplish their various functions through interactions across their major components. Components refers to functional entities within a large complex organization, such as business sectors, academic departments, or regional divisions. The dependency between the various components can cause risk to propagate through their overall system. This article presents a risk assessment framework that integrates risk across a diverse set of components to the overall organization functions. This project addresses three major challenges: aggregating risk, estimating component interdependencies including cycles of dependencies, and propagating risk across components. The framework aggregates risk assessments through a value function for severity that is evaluated at the expected outcome of accomplishing planned goals in terms of performance, schedule, and resources. The value function, which represents risk tolerance, scales between defined points corresponding to failure and success. Different risk assessment may be aggregated together. This article presents a novel approach to establishing relationships between the various components. This article develops and compares three network risk propagation models that characterize the overall organizational risk. The U.S. Air Force has applied this risk framework to evaluate success in hypothetical future wars. The analysts employing this risk framework have informed billions of dollars of strategic investment decisions.
ABSTRACT
The growing-complexity of the United States Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule has resulted in as many as five required injections during a single well-baby office visit. To reduce this number, vaccine manufacturers have developed combination vaccines that immunize against several diseases in a single injection. At the same time, a growing number of parents are challenging the safety and effectiveness of vaccinating children. They are also particularly concerned about the use of combination vaccines, since they believe that injecting a child with multiple antigens simultaneously may overwhelm a child's immune system. Moreover, combination vaccines make it more likely that extraimmunization (i.e., administering more than the required amount of vaccine antigens) occurs, resulting in greater concerns by parents and vaccine wastage costs borne by an already strained healthcare system. This paper formulates an integer programming model that solves for the maximum number of vaccines that can be administered without any extraimmunization. An exact dynamic programming algorithm and a randomized heuristic for the integer programming model is formulated and the heuristic is shown to be a randomized xi-approximation algorithm. Computational results are reported on three sets of test problems, based on existing and future childhood immunization schedules, to demonstrate their computational effectiveness and limitations. Given that future childhood immunization schedules may need to be solved for each child, on a case-by-case basis, the results reported here may provide a practical and valuable tool for the public health community.
