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A. Seidl, E. Kaplan, J. P. Caulkins, S. Wrzaczek, G. Feichtinger:
"Optimal Control of a Terror Queue";
European Journal of Operational Research, 248 (2016), 1; 246 - 256.

The task of covert intelligence agents is to detect and inter
dict terror plots.
Kaplan (2010) treats terror plots as customers and intellig
ence agents as servers in
a queuing model. We extend Kaplan´s insight to a dynamic mode
l that analyzes
the inter-temporal trade-off between damage caused by terro
r attacks and preven-
tion costs to address the question of how many agents to optim
ally assign to such
counter-terror measures. We compare scenarios which differ w
ith respect to the ex-
tent of the initial terror threat and study the qualitative r
obustness of the optimal
solution. We show that in general, the optimal number of agen
ts is not simply pro-
portional to the number of undetected plots. We also show tha
t while it is sensible
to deploy many agents when terrorists are moderately efficien
t in their ability to
mount attacks, relatively few agents should be deployed if t
errorists are inefficient
(giving agents many opportunities for detection), or if ter
rorists are highly efficient
(in which case agents become relatively ineffective). Furthe
rmore, we analyze the
implications of a policy that constraints the number of succ
essful terror attacks to
never increase. We find that the inclusion of a constraint pre
venting one of the state
variables to grow leads to a continuum of steady states, some
which are much more
costly to society than the more forward-looking optimal pol
icy that temporarily
allows the number of terror attacks to increase

Counterterrorism,Optimal control,Queues,Intelligence,Staffing models

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2015.07.010

Project Head Gernot Tragler:
Dynamische Optimierungsmodelle mit diskreten Ereignissen