Allocating explosive screening devices for aviation security

This paper investigates the problem of allocating aviation security baggage screening devices across a set of airports. Prior to boarding an aircraft, passengers are divided into classes based on a passenger prescreening system that measures their perceived risk levels, which results in each passenger’s baggage being screened by one or more security procedures. An explosive screening device allocation model is formulated to assign both the type of and number of devices to each class at each airport such that the total security is maximized subject to budget, resource, and throughput constraints. A Lagrangian relaxation is used to compute an upper bound for this objective function. Three heuristics, based on information from the Lagrangian relaxation, are proposed for addressing this model. Computational results are provided for several randomly generated problems, to provide insight into the effectiveness of the heuristics.