Border intervention is an important preventative measure to stop pests and diseases arriving and establishing in new areas; however, it is impractical to thoroughly inspect everything that crosses the border. Instead, we need risk-based systems that both intercept many consignments and provide valuable information about system performance. In reality, developing system-wide inspection and risk profiling policy is challenging because of the large volume of consignments and the wide range of biosecurity risks.

To help inform border policy, CEBRA have developed a flexible mathematical model that can simulate consignments and provide a comprehensive approach to exploring different inspection policies and processes. Using different candidate inspection policies arranged in varying configurations and ‘tunings’, the model can estimate the amount of detected and undetected contamination, the required search effort, and the level of surveillance information they provide on the system.