Citation

Remias S, Hainen A, Bullock D. Transp. Res. Rec. 2013; 2325: 63-75.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences USA, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.3141/2325-07

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The process of traveling to an airport, passing through various processes, and ultimately departing the airport involves many activities. This paper focuses on the use of probe data obtained from phones with discoverable Bluetooth devices to sample the time needed for passengers to travel from the nonsterile to the sterile side of an airport facility. To collect these data, the Kenton County Airport Board partnered with Purdue University to conduct a study at the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, Hebron, over a 4-week period during the 2011 Thanksgiving holiday. Bluetooth monitoring stations (BMSs) were used to collect unique identifiers from approximately 46,000 devices and to compute more than 1.5 million travel times between 17 BMSs. With a Pareto distribution approach, hourly security wait times were ordered, and a methodology was developed to identify periods for which opportunities might exist to reduce wait times (relative to a specified maximum wait time) by opening more security lanes, as well as periods for which opportunities might exist to reduce the number of lanes operating. With this methodology, it was determined that only 5 h during the study period had median wait times of greater than 20 min during November 2011. The paper concludes by discussing how this technique can be used to perform longitudinal comparisons between airports as additional airports begin automating the collection of checkpoint wait times.