Development of a Cargo Screening Process Simulator: A First Approach

Some manufacturers provide benchmarks for individual sensors but we found no benchmarks that take a holistic view of the overall screening procedures and no benchmarks that take operator variability into account. Just adding up resources and manpower used is not an effective way for assessing systems where human decision-making and operator compliance to rules play a vital role. Our aim is to develop a decision support tool (cargo-screening system simulator) that will map the right technology and manpower to the right commodity-threat combination in order to maximise detection rates. In this paper we present our ideas for developing such a system and highlight the research challenges we have identified. Then we introduce our first case study and report on the progress we have made so far. Keywords: port security, cargo screening, modelling and simulation, decision support, detection rate matrix 1. INTRODUCTION The primary goal of cargo screening at sea ports and air ports is to detect human stowaways, conventional, nuclear, chemical and radiological weapons and other potential threats. This is an extremely difficult task due to the sheer volume of cargo being moved through ports between countries. For example in sea freight, 200 million containers are moved through 220 ports around the globe every year; this is 90% of all non bulk sea cargo (Dorndorf, Herbers, Panascia, and Zimmermann 2007). Little is known about the efficiency of current cargo screening processes as few benchmarks exist against which they could be measured (e.g.