Strategic Material Shortfall Risk Mitigation Optimization Model (OPTIM-SM)

The Department of Defense periodically assesses the potential for shortfalls of strategic and critical materials to occur during crises or military conflicts and recommends to Congress strategies for mitigating those shortfalls. This document presents a model the Institute for Defense Analyses has built and used to identify strategies that would minimize the expected total risk from shortfalls while satisfying constraints on expected total cost and expected risks arising from shortfalls in individual materials. DoD's analytical process selects materials of interest, estimates the material shortfalls occurring in one or more planning scenarios, assesses shortfall risk, identifies promising shortfall mitigation strategies, and assesses the strategies relative costs and mitigation effectiveness. This model uses those results and identifies an optimal set of strategies for mitigating the shortfalls, within cost and risk constraints set by the user. It does so by solving a linear or non-linear programming problem (depending on the form of the risk function the assumed relationship between shortfall size and shortfall consequences). This document demonstrates the functionality of the model by presenting analyses performed on data developed for the DOD Strategic and Critical Materials 2013 Report on Stockpile Requirements.