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Letters & CommentsThe authors are research staff members at the Institute for Defense Analyses. IDA is a federally-funded research and development center that assists the Department of Defense and other agencies in addressing important national security issues, particularly those requiring scientific and technical expertise.
The authors may be contacted via Dr. Barnett, dbarnett@ida.org.
AUTHOR:Lowell Bruce Anderson
Dr. Lowell Bruce Anderson received degrees from Johns Hopkins and Northwestern, served in Vietnam, and joined IDA in 1971. He has won the ORSA/MAS Prize and IDA’s Goodpaster Award. Robert Bovey and Sean Barnett were task leads on this effort.
AUTHOR:Robert J Atwell
Dr. Robert Atwell received degrees from Manhattan College and Georgetown University. He joined IDA in 1984.
AUTHOR:D Sean Bovey
Dr. Bovey has specialized for the last ten years in homeland security and homeland defense subjects.
AUTHOR:Robert L Barnett
Dr. Barnett’s work has focused on military force structure and mobilization planning, risk analysis, and combat modeling.
Application of the Maximum Flow Problem to Sensor Placement on Urban Road Networks for Homeland Security
ABSTRACT:
The use of sensors in the detection of terrorists, weapons, or dangerous materials transported along the roadways of the United States
could contribute to the protection of urban population centers from attack.
Two critical issues in designing a system for detecting such attacks before they occur
are determining how many sensors would be needed and where they should be located.
This article discusses a methodology developed at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA)
to help find optimal sensor locations on urban road networks.
This methodology uses network theory to identify a minimum cut set
(a smallest set of road segments necessary to cut to completely block flow through the road network).
We applied this methodology to the road network of the New York City metropolitan area
and it found that the minimum cut set is about 104 times smaller than the number of road segments in the network.
This work was sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security.
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SUGGESTED CITATION:
Anderson, Lowell Bruce, Robert J. Atwell, D. Sean Barnett, and Robert L. Bovey. “Application of the Maximum Flow Problem to Sensor Placement on Urban Road Networks for Homeland Security.” Homeland Security Affairs III, no. 3 (September 2007)http://www.hsaj.org/?article=3.3.4