pirates and operations research, part II

I thoroughly enjoyed the feedback I received for my podcast about pirates and operations research. I feel obligated to write a post about an actual paper in the latest Decision Analysis issue about pirates and operations research written by Juan Carlos Sevillano, David Rios Insua, and Jesus Rios. Here is the abstract:

We show how adversarial risk analysis may cope with a current important security issue in relation with piracy off the Somali coasts. Specifically, we describe how to support the owner of a ship in managing risks from piracy in that area. We illustrate how a sequential defend–attack–defend model can be used to formulate this decision problem and solve it for the ship owner. Our formulation models the pirates’ behavior through the analysis of how they could solve their decision problem.

When Richard and I recorded the podcast a few months ago, we had no idea that there were actual research projects involving pirates and operations research. What a pleasant surprise!