Illinois Sheldon H. Jacobson developed algorithms to address risk in airline passenger populations to help determine how best to allocate airport security resources.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Anyone who has flown on a commercial airline since 2001 is well aware of increasingly strict measures at airport security checkpoints. A study by Illinois researchers demonstrates that intensive screening of all passengers actually makes the system less secure by overtaxing security resources. University of Illinois computer science and mathematics professor Sheldon H. Jacobson, in collaboration with Adrian J. Lee at the Central Illinois Technology and Education Research Institute, explored the benefit of matching passenger risk with security assets. The pair detailed their work in the journal Transportation Science. "A natural tendency, when limited information is available about from where the next threat will come, is to overestimate the overall risk in the system," Jacobson said. "This actually makes the system less secure by over-allocating security resources to those in the system that are low on the risk scale relative to others in the system." When overestimating the population risk, a larger proportion of high-risk passengers are designated for too little screening while a larger proportion of low-risk passengers are subjected to too much screening.
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