Scheduling policies for an antiterrorist surveillance system

Kyle Y. Lin, Moshe Kress and Roberto Szechtman

Naval Research Logistics (NRL), 2009, vol. 56, issue 2, 113-126

Abstract: This article concerns scheduling policies in a surveillance system aimed at detecting a terrorist attack in time. Terrorist suspects arriving at a public area are subject to continuous monitoring, while a surveillance team takes their biometric signatures and compares them with records stored in a terrorist database. Because the surveillance team can screen only one terrorist suspect at a time, the team faces a dynamic scheduling problem among the suspects. We build a model consisting of an M/G/1 queue with two types of customers—red and white—to study this problem. Both types of customers are impatient but the reneging time distributions are different. The server only receives a reward by serving a red customer and can use the time a customer has spent in the queue to deduce its likely type. In a few special cases, a simple service rule—such as first‐come‐first‐serve—is optimal. We explain why the problem is in general difficult and we develop a heuristic policy motivated by the fact that terrorist attacks tend to be rare events. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009

Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:navres:v:56:y:2009:i:2:p:113-126

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