Continuous Risk-Based Scheduling for Food Safety Inspection: Integrating Historical Decay with Event-Driven Consumer Review Signals

Abstract

Batch risk-based inspection scheduling struggles to detect a critical failure class: food facilities with recent clean inspections that subsequently develop severe violations. Traditional systems recompute risk on fixed planning cycles using static historical data, leaving blind spots between inspection cycles. To address this, we introduce the Continuous Inspection Risk (CIR) system, an event-driven scheduling pipeline that re-ranks the inspection queue dynamically as new data arrives. CIR combines a decay-weighted historical score with a stream of real-time consumer reviews triaged by a language-model classifier. A key structural contribution is our temporal partition rule, which strictly excludes reviews predating the most recent inspection to prevent superseded signals from skewing current risk. Evaluating CIR on 9,505 routine inspections in Santa Clara County, California (2024-2026), we show that history-based scoring alone reduces mean time-to-detection of major violations by 69 days (20.9%) under a 30% inspection budget, but fails to anticipate severe vermin-related closures (0/8 detected). Incorporating post-inspection review signals drastically improves performance, predicting 7 of 8 vermin closures with an average lead time of 117 days-firing on the exact day of review publication in four instances. Introducing a review corroboration rule improves precision from 0.70 to 0.78 without loss of recall. Finally, we analyze critical implementation challenges, documenting a data-hygiene pitfall (stale review leakage across inspection boundaries) and an evaluation limitation involving unobserved facility self-remediation. This work provides the first case-level evaluation of event-driven inspection triggering using open data and provides a reproducible benchmark for review-augmented public health systems