IIE Transactions
Focused Issue on Operations Engineering and Analysis
Homeland Security Department

Editors

• Department Editor: Jeffrey W. Herrmann, University of Maryland
• Associate Editor: Laura A. McLay, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Associate Editor: Julie L. Swann, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Associate Editor: P. Daniel Wright, Villanova University

Homeland security requires designing effective and efficient systems for securing borders, protecting transportation systems and other critical infrastructure, analyzing threats, detecting attacks, responding to natural disasters and terrorism, and recovering from these emergencies. Poorly designed systems increase the chances that an attack will occur and magnify the impact of an attack or disaster, resulting in more deaths, injuries, and financial losses. These systems include those that are operating every day (such as airline passenger screening) and those that exist only as plans for possible scenarios (such as the mass dispensing of medication in response to the release of anthrax). In either case, the models and methodologies of operations research can be applied to design better systems.

This department intends to publish papers that describe innovative operations research models and methodologies that can help organizations design better homeland security systems, including those for planning, prevention, response, and recovery. This department defines homeland security broadly but is focused on advanced quantitative and analytical methods to design systems, make better decisions, and solve problems. Accordingly, papers describing straightforward applications of existing techniques should be submitted to other venues.

The department's scope includes the following topics (and other related topics):

• threat analysis
• information analysis
• border, maritime, and port security
• explosives detection
• transportation security
• protecting critical infrastructure
• cyber security
• food safety
• detecting attacks
• predicting the consequences of an attack
• emergency preparedness and response
• evacuation modeling
• recovery efforts

Papers submitted to this department must clearly motivate the problem's relevance to homeland security and should make substantive and innovative contributions to solving the problem. Papers that describe collaborations and applications of the research and papers that evaluate public policy alternatives are particularly desired.

Special Issue on Homeland Security

IIE Transactions, Volume 39, Issue 1, 2007, was a special issue on homeland security. The editors were Sheldon H. Jacobson, John E. Kobza, and Edward Pohl. See the journal web site for the table of contents.

Authors interested in submitting a paper to this department are encouraged to contact the department editor at jwh2@umd.edu or 301-405-5433.

For more information about IIE Transactions and the manuscript submission process, visit the journal web site.