Risk-based Policies for Aviation Security Passenger Screening

Abstract: Passenger screening is an important component of aviation security that incorporates real-time passenger screening strategies designed to maximize effectiveness in identifying potential terrorist attacks. This paper identifies a methodology that can be used to sequentially and optimally assign passengers to aviation security resources. An automated prescreening system determines passengers’ perceived risk levels, which become known as passengers check-in. The levels are available for determining security class assignments sequentially as passengers enter security screening. A passenger is then assigned to one of several available security classes, each of which corresponds to a particular set of screening devices. The objective is to use the passengers’ perceived risk levels to determine the optimal policy for passenger screening assignments that maximize the expected total security, subject to capacity and assignment constraints. The sequential passenger assignment problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, and an optimal policy is found using dynamic programming. The general result from the sequential stochastic assignment problem is adapted to provide a heuristic for assigning passengers to security classes in real time. A condition is provided under which this heuristic yields the optimal policy. The model is illustrated with an example that incorporates data extracted from the Official Airline Guide. Joint work with Laura A. McLay (VCU), Adrian J. Lee (CITERI)

Bio: Sheldon H. Jacobson is a Professor and Director of the Simulation and Optimization Laboratory at the University of Illinois. He has a broad set of basic and applied research interests, including problems related to optimal decision-making under uncertainty, aviation security, and public health. His research has been disseminated in a variety of journals, including Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, IIE Transactions, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and Transportation Science. He has been recognized with several national awards, including the Aviation Security Research Award, a Best Paper Award in IIE Transactions Focused Issue on Operations Engineering, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Outstanding IIE Publication Award, the IIE Award for Technical Innovation in Industrial Engineering, and an IIE Fellow (2011). His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He currently serves as the Focused Issue Editor for Operations Engineering and Analysis for IIE Transactions.