Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis
Introduction
The Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis research group (RADAR) is unique in the UK in its focus
on problems of decision-making under uncertainty,
and is a world-leader in the development of Bayesian net technologies. Research areas include
the assessment of software risk, vehicle reliability, risk assessment in air traffic management
systems, complex legal evidence, financial and operational risk in the banking sector, as well
as personalisation and recommender systems. The work of the group was historically concerned
with software measurement and assessment (especially for critical systems). Their current work
on the problems of decision-making under uncertainty focuses on high-stake environments, where
decisions have to be made about risk in critical systems, with a need for rigorous quantified
methods of assessment that are fully auditable. RADAR tackles this problem by using causal
modelling, notably Bayesian Networks (BNs) in novel ways.
Since its establishment at Queen Mary in March 2000, the group has attracted over a million pounds worth of research funding on projects such as SCULLY for providing a software tool for building large-scale Bayesian Nets; SIMP concerned with risk assessment and decision-making in complex systems integration projects; and SCORE for monitoring changes in an organisation's risk culture. Their latest project, eXdecide, aims to provide quantitative risk assessment that can be tailored to suit any type of development process, and which relies on minimal assumptions about available data. If successful, this project could revolutionise the way practitioners approach software risk as they will finally be able to make sensible judgements about relevant trade-offs in practice and will be able to easily communicate the reason for their judgements.
The group has close links with industry, including companies such as Algorithmics, Philips, Motorola, QinetiQ, Railtrack, and National Air Traffic Control. In addition, Prof Norman Fenton and Dr Martin Neil are founder members and directors of Agena Ltd, a company that specialises in risk management for critical and business systems and builds BN-based decision support systems for a range of major clients.
One key example of the group's work is Prof Fenton and Dr Neil's application of Bayesian techniques to legal evidence such as DNA profiling.