Distributing inspections in space and time – Proposed solution of a difficult problem

Rudolf Avenhaus and Thomas Krieger

European Journal of Operational Research, 2013, vol. 231, issue 3, 712-719

Abstract: There are several identical facilities in which precious or dangerous material is processed or stored. Since parts of this material may be diverted by some manager or employee of these facilities or since failures in the processing of the material may occur, an authorized organization inspects these facilities regularly at the beginning and at the end of some reference time interval. In order to shorten the time required for detecting such an illegal activity or failures, in addition some interim inspections are performed in these facilities during the reference time interval. The optimal distribution of these interim inspections in space and time poses considerable analytical problems since adversary strategies have to be taken into account. So far only special cases have been analysed successfully, but these results lead to a conjecture for the solution of the general case which is surprisingly simple in view of the complexity of this inspection problem.

Keywords: Game theory; Inspection games; Expected detection time; Illegal behavior; Error second kind (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221713005353
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:231:y:2013:i:3:p:712-719

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2013.06.028

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().