Working to Make Airport Security Inspection Safer and More Efficient
A UB team is studying current airport inspection strategies and designs to identify inefficient practices that cause delays, while making sure that safety is not compromised.This study of airport security systems is a radically new strategy in the field of airport security in that it applies industrial quality control principles to airport security system design. Most significantly, these studies have demonstrated that even if all passengers are treated as equally risky, the efficiency of the system can be improved by increasing the number of random passenger searches.
By developing steady-state queuing models and simulation models of passenger and baggage flow through the airport security system, the team can determine the effectiveness of the current inspection methods. The simulation models have also analyzed the temporal patterns of passenger arrivals and alarm probabilities at different times of day and the days of the week, as well as accounting for types of passengers, number of carry-on bags, time required for various inspection tasks, length of passenger queues, staffing levels, probability of detection, and probability of false alarms.
One aspect of the study examines how queue length in inspection queues affects the speed and accuracy of inspection. That is, when lines are longer and passengers more anxious or less cooperative, security personnel may speed up their process to move the passengers through more quickly, thereby possibly jeopardizing accuracy. Other prongs of the project include plotting possible paths for suicide bombers entering an airport. Assuming that a bomber would take the shortest possible path to the area of greatest number of people, the project undertakes to determine the best location for sensors to prevent such a calamity. These sensors would not be visible, and so would not alert potential terrorists.
Another part of the project is a proposal to separate passengers into groups according to their potential threat level. The threat level is determined by security flags attached to any passenger who is on a government watch list. Other methods of identifying possible threats might be determined by the method used to buy a ticket, or the purchase of a one-way ticket, especially if paid in cash or purchased the same day as travel.
Because passenger screening is so crucial to security, a major constituent of the project will be devoted to the simulation of an airport security system. Researchers are making repeated visits to the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, as well as to airports throughout the county, to observe arrival, check-in, and security procedures. They will be recording passenger volumes and staffing levels in order to model these factors in the simulation. They will also scrutinize the relationship between security performance and external factors such as queue length and work schedules.
