Using formal MS/OR modeling to support disaster recovery planning

All organizations are susceptible to a non-zero risk of experiencing out-of-course events, whether natural or man-made, that can lead to internal ‘disasters’ with respect to business operations. Different types of events (e.g. flood, earthquake, fire, theft, computer failure) have implications for the operations of modern organizations. Hence, there is a critical need for planning and recovery strategies for the effects of disasters. Disaster recovery plans (DRPs) aim at ensuring that organizations can function effectively during and following the occurrence of a disaster. As such, they possess cost, performance, reliability, and complexity characteristics that make their development and selection non-trivial. To date, there has been little modeling of disaster recovery issues in the MS/OR literature. We believe that many of the issues involved can benefit from the application of quantitative decision-making techniques. Consequently, in this paper our contribution is prescriptive rather than descriptive in nature and we propose the use of mathematical modeling as a decision support tool for successful development of a DRP. In arriving at a final DRP, decision-makers must consider a number of options or subplans and select a subset of these subplans for inclusion in the final plan. We present a mathematical programming model which helps the decision maker to select among competing subplans, a subset of subplans which maximizes the ‘value’ of the recovery capability of a recovery strategy. We use hypothetical situations to illustrate how this technique can be used to support the planning process.