Decision-Making Approach for Catastrophic Scenario Selection in Disaster Recovery Planning

Generally, throughout history, societies have failed to prepare beforehand for potential man made and natural catastrophic events. However, as societies evolve, their view on what can and should be done when affected by these types of events has shifted from a passive acknowledgement that catastrophes will happen, into a proactive stance on planning and organizing resources to mitigate their effects. This paper presents a decision-making based approach for catastrophic scenario selection to guide the process of disaster recovery planning development. The approach proposed can be used to identify the most damaging scenarios in terms of probability of outcome occurrence. Once these scenarios have been identified, the proposed approach produces a set of indices that allow for the computation of similarity, dissimilarity, coverage and exposure for a potential scenario with respect to all possible scenarios. Finally, based on these indices, scenarios are ranked and then selected for disaster recovery plan development.