Aviation police manpower supply planning under stochastic demands for airport security inspection duties

With the increasing number of passengers moving through airports worldwide, security inspection duty arrangements are becoming more and more important, and planning more and more difficult. To design a good aviation police manpower supply plan, the planner not only has to consider operating costs but also the variation and uncertainty of manpower demands encountered in actual operations. This study adopts mathematical programming techniques to construct a stochastic aviation police manpower supply model for airport security inspection duties. The mathematical programming software CPLEX is used to solve the model directly. The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated in a case study performed using the relevant data collected from the Taiwan Aviation Police Bureau with some reasonable assumptions. Different strategies are tested. The results demonstrate that the proposed model could be a useful and practical planning support tool for decision-makers.