Investing in transport security solutions: using the quantitative risk assessment (QRA) approach

Security has become a major concern for logistics and transportation managers. Statistics showing increasing trends in cargo theft, especially in road operations, as well as upcoming mandatory programs issued by EU and US governments, are requiring operators to increase their security degrees; i.e., by introducing new security routines, managerial strategies or by investing in technological systems. Thus, the new challenge faced by managers is to choose among wide sets of security solutions by trading off costs and impacts on security. Hence, this paper presents a methodology that takes advantage of the quantitative risk assessment (QRA) approach to compare costs and benefits, in form of risk reductions, of security solutions for road transport operations against theft. Subjective interpretations, from a Swedish group of security experts, are exploited to generate random data from triangular distributions and simulate their impact with Monte Carlo techniques. Finally, pros and cons of the methodology as well as future research are discussed.