A literature review on police patrolling problems

Police patrol is an effective crime prevention tool and boosts public confidence in urban security. Many interesting decision making problems appear in route design, resource allocation and jurisdiction planning. Many cities across the world have adopted a structured and intelligent method of police patrol due to the presence of a variety of operational and resource constraints. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in this domain, especially from the practice of operations research (OR) point of view. This is the first-of-its-kind review on police patrol presenting a classification scheme based on the type of problem, objective and modelling approach. In this novel scheme, one can track any paper almost readily to find the specific contribution. The applicability of OR in this domain is set to grow significantly as the governments formulate policies related to smart city planning and urban security. This study reveals many practical challenges in police patrolling for future research.