MODELING INFORMATION PROCESSES AND DERIVING MEASURABLE REQUIREMENTS IN PHYSICAL PROTECTION SYSTEM DESIGN

The study examines information processes in the conceptual design of physical protection systems and their role in transforming sensor outputs, operator inputs, and communication flows into timely protective action. Attention is focused on the fact that design sufficiency is constrained not only by sensors, barriers, and response forces, but also by delays and uncertainty arising between detection, decision, and dispatch. The purpose of the study is to formalize information processes as explicit design objects and to develop an approach for deriving measurable information requirements that can be justified and verified at the conceptual design stage. The objectives are to define a reference workflow from event generation to response activation, to decompose the total information-to-action time into operational stages, to incorporate uncertainty related to false alarms, ambiguity, workload, and degraded communications, and to link requirement statements with acceptance evidence. The research uses a conceptual and methodological approach based on systems analysis, scenario decomposition, latency structuring, and traceability mapping between threat scenarios, bottlenecks, requirement targets, and verification evidence. The study develops a structured information-to-action model that makes explicit the stages of sensing, validation, fusion, decision-making, communication, and dispatch. On this basis, a method is proposed for translating scenario-specific bottlenecks into verifiable requirements for timeliness, accuracy, completeness, and resilience. The study also identifies practical forms of acceptance evidence, including timed drills, log-based measurements, stress testing, and simulation-supported assessment. The results show that conceptual design becomes more defensible when information processes are modeled explicitly rather than treated as implicit assumptions. The proposed approach enables designers to justify measurable requirements, reveal critical latency sources, and support revalidation of design sufficiency under changing operational conditions.