Vulnerability assessment of physical protection systems: A bio-inspired approach

How to evaluate the effectiveness of a physical protection system (PPS) is still an open issue. The commonly used method is to calculate the delay time of a PPS. In this paper, a shortcoming of this method is pointed out that it cannot efficiently evaluate efficiency of a PPS when different paths have the same delay time. To address this issue, a bioinspired approach to assess the vulnerability assessment is proposed in this paper. The risk level of the certain area can be obtained through evidence theory to integrate information from multi-sources. Then, a path with the minimum sum of risk can be determined by a bio-inspired algorithm. The sum of the risk level can be seen as a new evaluation index of effectiveness of PPSs. Experimental results of a numerical example demonstrate that the proposed method can handle the vulnerability assessment problem of PPSs efficiently.