Quantifying energy condition violations in traversable wormholes

The theoretical' existence of traversable Lorentzian wormholes in the classical, macroscopic world is plagued by the violation of the well--known energy conditions of General Relativity. In this brief article we show : (i) how the extent of violation can be quantified using certain volume integrals (ii) whether this amount of violation’ can be minimised for some specific cut–and–paste geometric constructions. Examples and possibilities are also outlined.