Abstract
We analyze the problem of preventing biological invasions caused by ships transporting internationally traded goods between countries and continents. Specifically, we ask the following question: should a port manager have a small number of inspectors inspect arriving ships less stringently or should this manager have a large number of inspectors inspect the same ships more stringently? We use a simple queuing-theoretic framework and show that if decreasing the economic cost of regulation is very important then it makes more sense for the port manager to choose the less stringent inspection regime. In contrast, if reducing the damage from biological invasions is more salient then the port manager ought to pick the more stringent inspection regime.
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Notes
As Batabyal and Beladi (2004) have noted, the primary method of marine alien species introduction is through the dumping of ballast water. Cargo ships generally carry ballast water in order to increase vessel stability when they are not carrying full loads. When these ships come into port, this ballast water must be discharged before cargo can be loaded. It is estimated that over 4,000 species of invertebrates, algae, and fishes are being moved around the world in ship ballast tanks every day. Consider the case of Canada. It has been estimated that as much as 13 billion gallons or 50 million metric tonnes of overseas ballast water enters Canadian coastal ports every year. A recent analysis by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland computed that a liter of ballast water generally contains several billion organisms similar to viruses and up to 800 million bacteria. Two web sites that provide useful information on these issues are http://www.fundyforum.com/profile_archives and http://www.serc.si.edu
It should be noted that different modeling techniques involve different cross space and time variation features for the underlying physical processes and the associated uncertainties.
This result is important because it relates two important metrics in queuing models, i.e., the average queue size and the average customer waiting time in the stationary state. In the context of our paper, the average queue size is the average number of ships in our port system and the average customer waiting time is our AWS criterion.
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Acknowledgments
We thank George Christakos and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments on a pervious version of this paper. In addition, Batabyal acknowledges financial support from the USDA’s PREISM program by mean of cooperative Agreement 43-3AEM-4-80100 and from the Gosnell endowment at RIT. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Batabyal, A.A., Beladi, H. & Koo, W.W. Maritime trade, biological invasions, and the properties of alternate inspection regimes. Stoch Environ Res Ris Assess 19, 184–190 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-004-0216-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-004-0216-2