Universal asset assessment system based on excel™

At the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security the author presented a paper entitled “Comparing Apples to Oranges” which showed the fundamental problem of ranking assets on multiple-factors. In particular, the talk showed that programs like Carver2 cannot consistently order targets. In particular, the author contends that using a spreadsheet such as Excel™ permits users to do as good a job of assessing targets as more dedicated systems. To improve the usefulness of Excel™ for target selection, the author has written a module that permits the spreadsheet to identify Condorcet cycles so that users will get a more realistic understanding of the vulnerability of their various assets. This paper describes the theoretical basis for this module and illustrates its operation. This module is available from the author.