Humanizing the Traffic Police Assignment: Case of Taipei

抄録

Most of the traffic police assignment practices in Taiwan are based on experiential rules. Without an in-depth analysis, the prevailing practices may lead to overstaffing or unfair duties loading among the police. To rectify the shortcomings, this paper develops a linear programming (LP) model to solve the traffic police assignment problem. The core logic of the proposed model is to adjust the current work shifts in a reasonable manner and then schedule the available police manpower to various time intervals. For demonstration, the proposed LP model is applied to Da-an Precinct in Taipei. The results showed that it can save up to 16% on the existing deployable police force or 9% on the total police staff in the case precinct. Future directions for traffic police assignment are elaborated.