Increasing effectiveness and efficiency through risk-based deployments

Abstract

Over the past several years, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has begun shifting away from a one-size-fits-all approach to security and toward one predicated upon risk-based security principles. The TSA has also been called upon by the Government Accountability Office and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to make risk-based decisions regarding the allocation and deployment of its resources. This thesis established an initial strategic framework with which to evaluate possible options and applied this framework to explore three possible paths forward. The first path was maintaining the current approach to resource deployments. The second path was the collection and analysis of various data points in order to understand the risk environment. The third path was the use of Bayesian game-theory to model adversarial actions. With the framework applied, the use of Bayesian game-theory was identified as the most beneficial to TSA in comparison to the other two assessed options. Strategic recommendations are also provided based upon research into the experiences of other entities with risk-based deployment methodologies.