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Models and simulation make it easier to understand the benefits of security measures—as well as their impacts on normal operations. Port, transportation, and border officials can use this information to create workable, economic, and effective security systems that intelligently integrate technology and procedures.
Sandia has allocated internal funding to develop the ability to simulate border operations. This simulation capability will help clarify the impacts of security technologies and procedures on border operations.
Findings could help U.S. ports of entry use technologies efficiently to uncover threats, while minimizing effects on people and businesses.
To complete this project, Sandia created detailed technical specifications that capture border crossing flows, technology attributes, and concepts of operation for several air, sea, and land ports of entry.
The simulation has enabled trade-off and sensitivity analyses. One simulation project, for example, has quantified the impacts and security benefits of deploying radiation detection technologies at these ports.
Through the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC)—a DHS-sponsored partnership between Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories—Sandia has helped build models that provide a systems-level understanding of the effects of security on port performance.
Specifically, these models help port operators explore the cost/benefit tradeoffs of various security measures—such as increasing inspections or placing scanners at various locations—on the flow of shipping containers through a port terminal.
In addition, the models show the effects infrastructure failures on the port. A companion long-term model looks at the effect of increased security costs on the economic viability of a port. These simulators—based on data gathered over 15 months—have been used in hands-on workshops that brought together organizations needed to successfully implement port-related policies. Participants were overwhelmingly enthusiastic and requested use of the models, development of the simulators as training tools, and collaborative efforts to modify the simulators for other ports.