Agent-based security risk assessment of the airport security system

Master thesis (2017)

Authors

B.M. Meijer Aerospace Engineering

Contributors

Alexei Sharpanskykh Air Transport & Operations - Aerospace Engineering (supervisor 1)
R. Curran Air Transport & Operations - Aerospace Engineering (supervisor 2)
M.J. Schuurman (supervisor 2)
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright: © 2017 Bart Meijer
Agent-Based Modelling Security risk assessment Airport security Data fusion
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Published Date

07-09-2017

Language

English

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Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

The thought of being secure has been on the minds of people throughout history. Security is the protection against intended incidents. Intended incidents happen due to a result of a deliberate and planned act. Security systems are implemented in order to set up security precautions which have as main goal the protection of all assets present within the environment under supervision. In recent years security in aviation, and especially in the airport environment, is getting more and more important. The rising variety and growing number of threats upon the airport environment lead to the need for universal and rapid deployment of individual security systems. This caused a segregated way of working of the entire airport security system. The hypothesis arises that this way of working is inefficient, and a performance increase can be achieved when the airport security system would be integrated. This research is aimed at analyzing a possible approach to integrate the airport security system and its influence on the performance indicators of the airport security system.

Some performance indicators of the airport security system, such as level of security and level of service, are in conflict with each other.

The agent-based modeling approach is used to properly represent the socio-technical nature of the airport security system. This way the individual agents can be modeled with their own set of rules, while addressing the relationships between agents in the airport environment as well. A specially designed security risk scenario, discussing the boundaries of the environment, the type of threats present and the type of threat sources and objects present, forms the basis of the input for the agent-based model.

This exploratory graduation thesis provides a first attempt in proposing an approach to integrate the current airport security system in order to increase performance in both the level of security and level of service. Three different configurations of an integrated airport security system are proposed by means of decision data fusion. Findings of this thesis showed the greatest potential improvement of the level of security and the level of service when implementing an integrated adaptive configuration of the airport security system.