Abstract
Effective management of border security requires effective measurement of the impact of alternative policies on unwanted cross-border flows. There are no agreed-upon ways to measure the amount of any particular inflow; some indicators are believed to rise and fall with each in-flow, but they do not measure the total flow. To combine multiple measures proportional to an unmeasurable flow, we introduce Principal Ray Analysis. The resulting estimates of fractional change in unseen flows, combined with cost information, support optimal incremental resource allocation, for any single type of flow. Extension to multiple flows requires agreement on the relative importance of reducing each of the flows. A common data store is recommended to support rational debate on cross-flow allocations and overall “security.”
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks Isaac Maya, Henry Willis, and Ali Abbas, of the CREATE Center at USC for valuable discussions, and experts at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who contributed time and expertise to educating us; DHS/OUP program officers Joseph Kielman and Gia Harrington, head DHS Office of University Programs (OUP), Matt Clark who saw the potential of rigorous management science in managing border security. Crucial thanks to Fred Roberts, and colleagues at CCICADA; and to Vicki Bier and Jeff Linderoth at the University of Wisconsin Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering, for support. Supported by DHS Contract 2009-ST-061-CCI002-07 and NSF Grant #1247696. Opinions expressed are those of the author and not of CCICADA, the DHS or the NSF.
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Kantor, P.B. (2017). Measuring Border Security for Resource Allocation. In: Rothe, J. (eds) Algorithmic Decision Theory. ADT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10576. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67504-6_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67504-6_28
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