Some Statistical Properties of a Generic Container Inspection Policy in Invasive Species Management

In recent times - see Batabyal and Nijkamp (2005) and Batabyal and Lee (2006) - there has been considerable interest in studying container inspection policies as a regulatory tool in invasive species management. In this note, we continue this line of inquiry and first delineate a generic container inspection policy. Next, we derive the generating function for the random number of containers in a seaport when this generic policy is used to inspect containers. Finally, we first compute the mean and the variance of the limiting distribution of the number of containers in the seaport under study and then we discuss three ways in which these two moments might be used to manage invasive species effectively