Safety at what price? : setting anti-terrorist policies for checked luggage on US domestic aircraft

In this thesis, we considered the costs and benefits of implementing Positive Passenger Bag Match (PPBM) - an anti-terrorist measure to keep bombs out of checked luggage - on US domestic passenger flights. We constructed a stochastic model for comparing the cost-effectiveness of three alternative approaches to PPBM: no PPBML implementation; a PPBM implementation that is applied to 5% of passengers; and a full (100%) implementation of PPBM. We made ranges of estimates concerning the level of terrorist risk, the costs of PPBM operation, the consequences of successful terrorist bombings, and the anti-terrorist effectiveness of both the partial and full PPBM implementations. Calculations showed that there were circumstances under which each policy was the most cost-effective of the three. Of the three options, not implementing PPBM at all was the most cost-effective approach for the largest percentage of the scenarios considered. We found that 5% PPBM captured the next largest portion of the scenarios, and was generally the optimal strategy when annual PPBMI operation costs were low, when 5% PPBM anti-terrorist effectiveness was high, and when the consequences of successful bombings were severe. We found 100%(. PPBM to be the optimal strategy for most scenarios which involved highly costly terrorist bombings, a high level of terrorist risk, and a 100% PPBM policy that provided much added security over 5% PPBM.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Cohen, Jonathan E. W. (Jonathan Ephraim Weis), 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Arnold I. Barnett.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36099

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36099