Abstract
Despite the known degrading impact of high nuisance and false alarm rates (NAR/FAR) on operator performance, analyses of security systems often ignores operator performance. We developed a model to analyze the impact of nuisance alarm rates on operator performance and on overall system performance. The model demonstrates that current methods that do not account for operator performance produce optimistic estimates of system performance. As shown in our model, even low NAR/FAR levels and the associated alarm queueing effect can increase operator detect and response time, which in turn reduces the amount of time the response force has to interrupt the intruder. An illustrative analysis shows that alarm processing times can be higher than the assessment time due to queue wait times and that systems with only one or two operators can become overwhelmed as NAR increases, decreasing system performance.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank John L. Russell and Judi See of Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. SAND2016-2179 C
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Bandlow, A., Jones, K.A., Brown, N.J.K., Nozick, L.K. (2017). The Impact of False and Nuisance Alarms on the Design Optimization of Physical Security Systems. In: Nunes, I. (eds) Advances in Human Factors and System Interactions. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 497. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41956-5_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41956-5_18
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