Reliability and Performance Assessment of an Aviation Security Screening Checkpoint

Passenger screening at airports has become significantly more visible and rigorous in the past decade. This screening is essential to prevent passengers from boarding an airplane with weapons or other dangerous items. Homeland Security research has produced new screening technologies capable of detecting a wider array of threats with greater confidence and speed. Nevertheless, enhanced security procedures can produce long waiting lines that harm passenger satisfaction and airline profitability. It is thus important to assess both the reliability (threat detection probability) and performance (passenger wait-time) of screening checkpoints that utilize these advanced technologies. This paper proposes an approach to assess the reliability and performance of a passenger screening checkpoint in terms of the reliability and performance of the constituent technologies as well as the probabilistic flow of passengers through the checkpoint. The results of our study indicate that the approach effectively quantifies the improvements to security and passenger wait-time that can be achieved by increasing passenger acceptance of new screening technologies, which are faster and more reliable.