Identifying direct and indirect cost of a disruption of a resource

摘要

A method and associated systems for automatically identifying critical resources in an organization. An organization creates a model of the dependencies between pairs of resource types, wherein that model describes how the organization's projects and services are affected when a resource type becomes unavailable. This model may include a system of directed graphs. This model may be used to automatically identify a resource type as critical if unacceptable cost is incurred by resuming projects and services rendered infeasible when the resource type is disrupted. The model may also be used to automatically identify a first resource type as critical for a second resource type when disruption of the first resource type forces the available capacity of the second resource type to fall below a threshold value.

主权项

1. A method for automatically identifying a cost to an organization caused by a disruption of a resource,
wherein units of the resource are made available by a plurality of resource instances, wherein a project requires a minimum number of units of the resource, wherein a total number of available units of the resource available to the project is a sum of the numbers of units that can be made available by all resource instances of the plurality or resource instances, and wherein a disruption of a first resource instance of the plurality of resource instances results in the first resource instance becoming unable to make any units of the resource available to the project, the method comprising: a processor of a computer system receiving one or more dependency relationships, wherein a dependency relationship of the one or more dependency relationships relates an independent resource instance of the plurality of resource instances to a dependent resource instance of the plurality of resource instances, such that an independent disruption of the independent resource instance results in a resulting disruption of the dependent resource instance; the processor organizing the one or more received dependency relationships into a directed graph, wherein the directed graph represents a dependency relationship between two resource instances of the plurality of resource instances as a directed path between two nodes, and wherein the directed graph links a first dependency relationship to a second dependency relationship by using a same node to represent both an independent resource instance of the first dependency relationship and a dependent resource instance of the second dependency relationship, the processor adjusting the total number of available units account for an initial disruption of an initially disrupted resource instance of the plurality of resource instances by traversing a path of the directed graph, starting at anode that represents the initially disrupted resource instance, and by decreasing the total number of available units by a number of units that prior to the initial disruption had been made available by each resource instance represented by a node along the path; the processor identifying the cost of the initial disruption as a function of the adjusting.