Abstract
Evaluation of system effectiveness has numerous pitfalls. System objectives may be poorly defined, may shift during the system life or may be hard to quantify. Further, individual perceptions of the quantifications may differ. Whatever the cause, system effectiveness has been an elusive term to quantitatively define. The proposed model presents a quantitative system effectiveness model and establishes a utilitarian approach for its use with the illustrative application to a nuclear safeguards system. The model uses the Type I and Type II statistical error rates as input to the component or subsystem effectiveness calculation which, when combined using a utilitarian methodology, quantify the overall system effectiveness. The methodology will use a survey of expert judgment to determine the relative importance of the individual subsystems through a statistically designed web survey. The web based survey will be available to nuclear material protection, control, and accounting experts attending the 2008 INMM conference. This model and methodology will provide a repeatable quantifiable measure for any system but in this case a simple safeguards system is used as an example.