The Current State of the Vulnerability Assessment and Protection Option (VAPO) Software Program and its
Applicability to the Explosives Safety Community
Nichols, James F., Ph.D.; Applied Research Associates, Inc.; Raleigh, NC USA
Nelson, James L., PE; Defense Threat Reduction Agency; Fort Belvoir, VA USA
Keywords: vulnerability assessments, software tools, blast effects modeling
Abstract:
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) started the development of the Vulnerability Assessment and
Protection Option (VAPO) in 2003 to address the need for an integrated, GIS-based, 3D modeling and simulation
tool for Department of Defense vulnerability assessors. The key methodologies that have been assembled include
airblast, fragmentation, structural damage, glass damage, structural collapse, and human injury. As the VAPO user
base has expanded over the years, the current VAPO 6.0 software tool has been pushed to its technical limits in the
size of allowed calculations.
This paper describes how the VAPO 7.0 codebase has been developed over the past couple of years into a plug-and-
play architecture with plug-ins created for the vulnerability assessment community. A Software Development Kit
(SDK) is being developed for the government community that allows other agencies to create their own plug-ins to
address their specific use cases that involve high explosive modeling. DTRA hopes that having a systematic way of
sharing engineering methodologies using a shared architectural foundation will allow more agencies to collaborate
and re-use engineering models, while saving the costs of re-developing similar codes and allowing funds to be
directed towards truly unique problems that have not been solved in the past.
Background
The Vulnerability Assessment and Protection Option (VAPO) program was started in 2003 as a seed effort to collect
requirements and survey the current state of software for vulnerability assessments. Operational groups within the
Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), including the Joint Mission Assurance Assessment
(JMAA) and the
Balanced Survivability Assessment (BSA) teams, were in need of a more comprehensive GIS-based assessment tool
to better convey their findings and recommendations to decision makers at the assessed sites. VAPO was initiated to
both create an end-to-end tool for vulnerability assessors as well as to create modeling and simulation visualizations
that could be understood by non-engineers who needed to prioritize budgets for facility upgrades and retrofits.
In 2004, VAPO 1.0 was released to the DoD community. Since 2004, DTRA has consistently released new versions
every 12-18 months. VAPO is fundamentally an integration of many engineering methodologies, with a long history
of weapons effects testing and modeling. The software capitalizes on over 60 years of research investments by the
DTRA and its partners. In addition to a substantial pool of antiterrorism research, VAPO uses research conducted
for weapon development or offensive attack planning to develop protection-conservative models to better protect US
and allied facilities from terrorist or military attacks. The program combines a diverse set of fast-running threat
environment and vulnerable asset response models into a single integrated workflow.
Today, DTRA distributes VAPO throughout the DoD and US Federal Government as well as to state and local law
enforcement through an agreement with DHS S&T and to allies through international R&D project agreements.
VAPO has found a variety of uses with different communities with the primary use cases being vulnerability
assessments for force protection, mission survivability, or major event planning.
Previously known as the Joint Staff Integrated Vulnerability Assessment (JSIVA) teams
