Port-of-entry safety via the reliability optimization of container inspection strategy through an evolutionary approach

Abstract Up to now, of all the containers received in USA ports, roughly between 2% and 5% are scrutinized to determine if they could cause some type of danger or contain suspicious goods. Recently, concerns have been raised regarding the type of attack that could happen via container cargo leading to devastating economic, psychological and sociological effects. Overall, this paper is concerned with developing an inspection strategy that minimizes the total cost of inspection while maintaining a user-specified detection rate for “suspicious” containers. In this respect, a general model for describing an inspection strategy is proposed. The strategy is regarded as an (n+1)-echelon decision tree where at each of these echelons, a decision has to be taken, regarding which sensor to be used, if at all. Second, based on the general decision-tree model, this paper presents a minimum cost container inspection strategy that conforms to a pre-specified user detection rate under the assumption that different sensors with different reliability and cost characteristics can be used. To generate an optimal inspection strategy, an evolutionary optimization approach known as probabilistic solution discovery algorithm has been used.