A New System for Protecting the Nation's Ports

By Lesley Kriewald and John Holder

One of today’s scariest realities is terrorism. And one real nightmare scenario is an attack on the nation’s ports. Cities have grown up around our ports and waterways and these major population centers are vulnerable to a variety of different threats, from poisonous gas to explosives to other kinds of weapons. Attacks with chemical or explosive agents could be devastating to both a port and the city surrounding it.

The port of Houston, Texas, is a prime example—one that’s literally close to home for the Texas A&M University community. Two engineering professors at Texas A&M are using the Houston Ship Channel as the real-world basis for creating mathematical models aimed at improving security in U.S. ports and waterways.

Wilbert E. Wilhelm and Yu Ding, professors in the department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, will make their mathematical models generic enough to apply to any U.S. port and waterway. The models they are creating, through a grant from the National Science Foundation, seek to better understand how a surveillance sensor network should work, to allow better decision making by port and waterway security personnel.

A big challenge in Wilhelm’s and Ding’s project is devising new kinds of computer programming to churn out sensor details: what kind of sensors are needed, the number of each type of sensor, and where the sensors should go in the surveillance system to counter potential threats most effectively. What makes this unique is their new system doesn’t rely on a single kind of sensor, but a variety that could include television and infrared cameras, radar, sound, motion or heat detectors. Another benefit: the model they create also factors in economy…and will provide data so buying, installing and maintaining the sensors will be done in the most cost-effective way.

The kind of work Wilhelm and Ding are doing to custom-design sensor surveillance systems for ports has been—literally--uncharted waters, until now. Their model addresses practical, but complicated problems, like long, narrow and irregular shapes of ports and waterways.

With so many different kinds of sensors scrutinizing the ship channel and gathering different types of information, it’s likely that at any given time an individual sensor device may malfunction. To deal with this kind of uncertainty and continue to observe potential threats, the researchers’ model design includes fault tolerance capability. Fault tolerance analysis is designed to address failures from things like adverse environmental conditions or tampering, and to determine the nature and cost of redundant features to protect the surveillance system from such problems.

As it integrates the massive flow of information from its many sensors into a coherent, intelligent picture, the surveillance system envisioned by Dr. Wilhelm and Dr. Ding should be able to detect anomalies… telling the difference between “normal” and abnormal operation and behavior of a ship in open water, in a ship channel or waterway. The system should also detect small, unauthorized craft that might pose a threat to sensitive port facilities.

The researchers believe that surveillance networks like the one their models are helping to define will also be useful in border security, underwater surveillance in ports and waterways, and coastline security. And that will mean a big improvement in the safety and security of our nation as a whole.