Engineering Aviation Security Environments—Reduction of False Alarms in Computed Tomography-Based Screening of Checked Baggage (2013) / Chapter Skim
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6 Data Collection, Management, and Analysis
6 Data Collection, Management, and Analysis
Pages 52-60
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From page 52... ...
Although new technologies continue to be developed to improve the TSA's ability to detect and intercept explosives that are intended to damage or destroy commercial airplanes, there is an immediate need to reduce the false alarms associated with checked baggage screening. One approach to reducing the number of false alarms is to structure a data collection, management, and analysis system to allow studies of screening processes for the explicit purpose of tracking false positives with the intent of obtaining a better understanding of their causes.
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From page 53... ...
Finding: Discussion with TSA officials, airport personnel, and vendors indicates some limitedscale data collection and laboratory studies that have enabled the sources of false alarms to be broadly identified. However, system-wide data collection and analysis of the sort necessary to seek out the root causes and guide sustained improvements are not being done.
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From page 54... ...
Quantitative risk assessment (see Appendix B for a more detailed description and a simple illustration outlining a QRA for quantifying the cost of false positives) provides methods to study and quantify the risk of extremely rare events, and especially events for which there are very limited data.
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From page 55... ...
• The second population includes bags whose contents include items that are misidentified by the EDS as potential threat items -- for example, when the item's properties fall within the window defined for threat items, or multiple items are mistakenly aggregated into a single object that meets the criteria for a potential threat item. Without systematic data that can be used to establish how much each population of bags contributes to the overall false alarm rate, or what the specific causes of false alarms are within each population, it is difficult to know what the right course of action is.
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From page 56... ...
Then the process-monitoring tools could be used to assess the actual effect on the false alarm rate caused by any changes. Uniform reporting standards that can be used to generate reports automatically, giving detailed information for each screening facility, would be a necessary part of any data management system that is 2 The size of the sample necessary to be statistically relevant ultimately will be dependent on the level of precision desired, the number of variables considered, and the number of effects being measured.
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From page 57... ...
, traveler behavior, local facility conditions, and various uncontrolled factors could have an adverse effect on PD. Red-team testing, based on a standard bag set containing simulated threats that the inspection process would be expected to catch, can be used to study the actual operating characteristics of the complete system in its actual operating environment.
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From page 58... ...
Methods of quantitative risk assessment, driven by information in the recommended TSA database, would be useful as an assessment and decision-making tool and would help uncover relationships among the many systems inputs and controls and operational costs, as well as help quantify the risk of a harmful attack. To keep the baggage-inspection process running correctly and to have the tools needed for process improvement, it will be necessary to employ process-monitoring methods that make use of the stream of data being generated by the process and to have detailed knowledge of the root causes of false positives.
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From page 59... ...
Appendixes
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Key Terms
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