Information Processes in the Conceptual Design of Physical Protection Systems

Physical protection systems are commonly described and reviewed through the lens of hardware and procedural compliance, yet operational sufficiency in realistic adversarial conditions is frequently constrained by information processes that connect sensing to action. This paper formalizes information processes as first-class design objects in the conceptual design of physical protection systems and provides a reproducible method for deriving measurable information requirements with explicit acceptance evidence. The proposed framework models the information-to-action workflow as a structured chain that includes event generation and detection, alarm validation, multi-source fusion, command-and-control decision-making, communications, dispatch, and response activation. Latency is decomposed into measurable components and , enabling the total information-to-action time to be bounded for representative scenarios. Information quality is treated through operational metrics such as timely-detection probability , correct-classification probability , false-alarm rate, and communications availability under degraded conditions. Scenario classes are used to identify dominant information bottlenecks, including ambiguity-driven validation delays, false-alarm saturation, insider-assisted boundary collapse, multi-event concurrency, and communications degradation. For each class, the method specifies how to translate bottlenecks into verifiable requirement targets and how to select acceptance evidence via instrumented timed drills, log-based measurement, stress testing, and simulation or hybrid approaches where empirical sampling is limited. The framework strengthens review defensibility by linking each information requirement to scenario-driven needs, by making latency and uncertainty explicit at the conceptual stage, and by enabling lifecycle revalidation through feedback from logs and after-action review.