SysE 575 Reducing Risk in Decision Making

Examines the concepts, techniques and tools for managing risk and making decisions as key components of the systems engineering process. Risk connotes a measure of the probability and severity of an undesired event. Begins with an overview of the risk management (identifying, assessing, monitoring, and mitigating) and decision process. Differences between mission critical and non-mission critical programmatic risk emphasized. Other topics include the limits of expected value-based risk analysis, decision making strategies such as max/min, min/max and regrets. Formal methods in risk analysis, elementary decision analysis and decision trees, multi-objective decision making, pareto techniques, optimality, and trade-off analysis will be covered. Risk and decision techniques will be contrasted with the interfacing processes of program management and software engineering, from both the government and industrial perspectives.