Design and implementation of a computation server for optimization with application to the analysis of critical infrastructure

Abstract

Despite recent advances in the computational performance of decision support tools for Operations Analysis, there remains a persistent challenge in the deployment and use of sophisticated models by analysts who operate in limited computing environments. Recently, there has been a move toward cloud-based computing architectures that attempt to solve this problem by decoupling the user interface from the remote computational resources. The objective of this thesis is to provide a flexible and robust implementation of a server architecture and procedure for rapid development and deployment of decision support tools. This thesis identifies functional requirements, develops an architecture to support those requirements, implements a prototype solution, and demonstrates the effectiveness of the solution for a simplified example of interdependent infrastructure systems optimization.