The design and use of BALANCE for homeland security

The protection of airports, sea ports and other distributed facilities is difficult to achieve in a balanced way. QinetiQ\´s expertise in modelling the interactions between personnel, vehicles and sensors and their associated communications needs can be used to determine whether the protection planned achieves the desired levels of protection. The tool used to determine areas of weakness, where intrusion could occur, or terrorist threats realised, is known as the baselined assessment of land, air, and naval civilian establishments (BALANCE) model which builds upon QinetiQ\´s tactical level military modelling capability and focuses it into the counter-terrorist arena. The use of time-stepped stochastic models for predicting outcomes of encounters has been known for many years in the defence field. The BALANCE model exploits this expertise to perform statistically significant numbers of simulated threat attacks, and responses to evaluate the protection afforded by security systems. Building upon the results obtained, security measures and responses can be optimised to meet the identified threat classes. In this way, balanced protection for such establishments can be achieved and "what if games played to determine areas of weakness. The paper describes the design, and use of BALANCE in this application.