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Homeland Security Inter-Professional Project (IPRO)

Students:

George Taylor, CPE	Jim McNally, CE	Piotr Stanczyk, BMTM
Grace Nijm, CPE	Halil Sylejmani, CPE	Daniel Olejouvz, BMTM
Richard Monteverde, ME	Jermaine Ealy, BMTM	Chris Koniecko, BMTM
Scott Larson, BMTM	Maciej Franaik, BMTM	Scott Jones, EE

Faculty:
Dr. Dan Tomal, Associate Director and Adjunct Faculty, Manufacturing Technology and Management
Dr. Keith McKee, Director of Manufacturing Technology and Management
Dr. Bob Carlson, Associate Dean and Director of the Center for Professional Development

Project:
To design a software program that contains a matrix of risk and preventive factors that assess how well an organization meets Homeland Security Guidelines aimed at preventing terrorist attacks, reducing the vulnerability to terrorism and minimizing the damage from potential attacks and natural disasters.

Outcome:
This Inter-Professional Project (IPRO) group created an assessment tool that consists of questions that assess the risk of a facility. The questions are divided into four main categories: Technological, Structural/Utilities, Criminal/Terrorist, and Environmental. The project used the questions to create a computer program that would interactively use the questions to assess the safety and security risks of a facility. An individual score for each of the four major categories and an overall score would then be reported.

In determining a final score for the risk assessment, weights were assigned to the questions. To facilitate straightforward scoring, all questions are structured in a format of only two possible answers per question: yes or no (to simplify the scoring procedure). By adding weights for the questions based upon the type of facility, the result of the risk assessment is better tailored to fit individual cases and consequently is more applicable to the user.

To further improve this assessment, additional questions are added based on the type of facility, such as whether the facility was a government building, academic institution, etc. By narrowing down more of the specifics of the facility in question, the program can be tailored to ask more case-specific questions.

Finally, the group included explanations along with the questions. These explanations are present to inform the user of why the question and the issue addressed are important. For the final software product, the user is provided with explanations of where the facility's shortcomings may exist along with the final risk assessment score.

The project tied for first place as the best IPRO.