An integrated modeling framework for quantitative business continuity assessment

Abstract

Systems are increasingly exposed to threats of disruptive events, e.g., failures, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc. A proactive approach is needed to protect the business and reduce the potential losses caused by these disruptive events. Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a way to integrate the recovery process within the preventive framework of risk assessment. Such integrated risk management strategy offers great potential benefits. However, the complexity of applying it in practice is such that existing BCM strategies are mainly based on qualitative methods only, which limits the potential added values. To support quantitative BCM, in this paper we define a set of quantitative business continuity metrics. The defined metrics are based on the estimated losses incurred by the disruptive event in the whole business process. For this, the business process is divided into four sequential phases, i.e., protection phase, mitigation phase, emergency phase and recovery phase. For each phase, a specific modeling method is developed and an integrated modeling framework is constructed for the business continuity. Simulation can, then, be used to quantify the business continuity metrics. The developed methods are applied to assess the business continuity of an oil storage tank farm

Interval-valued importance measures for business continuity management

“…In this section, we review the quantitative metrics and models for business continuity developed in Zeng and Zio (2016), which serve as a basis for the importance measures introduced in Section 3. Business process performance indicators, denoted by PPI B , are used to measure to which degree the objectives of the business process are satisfied. For example, the PPI B of an electric power distribution system can be the fraction of satisfied demands.…”

“…In Zeng and Zio (2016), three quantitative metrics for business continuity have been defined based on the losses caused by the disruptive events, i.e., EBCV, P BI and P BF .…”

“…In Zeng and Zio (2016), an integrated framework has been developed for modeling business continuity, as shown in Figure 1. The protection and mitigation measures are modeled within a fault tree and event tree logical scheme, the emergency measures are modeled within an event sequence diagram and the recovery measures are modeled by a semi-Markovian model.…”

“…In this section, we apply the developed intervalvalued importance measures on a case study from literature (Zeng and Zio, 2016). For illustrative purposes, we only present the results for IBCAW since IBCRW can be calculated in a similar way.…”

“…business continuity, whereas very few works consider the quantitative modeling and analysis of business continuity. In a recent work of the authors (Zeng and Zio, 2016), an integrated model has been developed for quantitative business continuity analysis. It allows calculating the business continuity metrics given information of business continuity measures, i.e., for protection, mitigation, emergency and recovery (Zeng and Zio, 2016).…”