Interdiction problem as a tool to identify an effective budget allocation to quality improvement plans

In the face of budgetary limitations in organizations, identifying critical facilities for investing in quality improvement plans could be a sensible approach. In this paper, hierarchical facilities with specified covering radius are considered. If disruption happens to a facility, its covering radius will be decreased. For this problem, a bi-objective mathematical formulation is proposed. Critical facilities are equivalent to the facilities which attacking them causes the most reduction in the quality of the system performance. Consequently, this problem is studied in the interdiction problem framework. To solve the multi-objective model the weighting-sum approaches are applied. The first interdictor's objective function helps decision makers to identify the vulnerability of the system. Moreover, the second objective function may assist in minimizing the cost of applied quality improvement plans.