83 A Proposed Risk-Informed Decision-Making Framework for NASA (PSAM-0368)

The January 2004 Presidential Directive to NASA to adopt a goal-oriented space exploration program poses many challenges. These include sustained and affordable human and robotic space programs to explore the Solar System starting with a human return to the Moon and subsequent human exploration of Mars. Meeting the exploration technical and safety goals while meeting programmatic constraints related to cost and schedule involves making complex decisions. In this paper, we propose a risk-informed decision-making framework to better manage uncertainties and to better balance competing priorities that decision makers face routinely during the various phases of the program execution. In this framework, stakeholder expectations related to technical performance attributes, such as safety, reliability, and mission performance, as well as for programmatic performance attributes, such as cost and schedule, can be defined in terms of a set of performance measures (PMs) that need to be quantitatively assessed and monitored during the entire life-cycle of the program. Risk-informed decision making, as described in this paper, is the formal process of analyzing various decision alternatives with respect to their impact on the PMs, of assessing uncertainty associated with their degree of impact, and of selecting the optimal decision alternative using formal decision theory and taking into consideration program constrains, stakeholder expectations, and the magnitude of uncertainties. The proposed framework is based on an analytic-deliberative decision-making methodology that consists of three major steps: (1) formulation and selection of decision alternatives, (2) analysis and ranking of decision alternatives, and (3) selection of the best decision alternative. These steps are linked and are supported by a deliberation process in which the decision-makers scrutinize the initial set of decision alternatives and results of the analysis of decision alternatives to ensure that they are meaningful and that important concerns not captured by the analysis are considered.