Risk modeling and simulation of airport passenger departures process

Airport security is a key element of homeland security strategy. This paper presents a process based approach to modeling and simulation of airport security. A quantitative measure of process security, called permeability, has been defined. We use the simplifying passenger travel (SPT) model of passenger departures process to illustrate the methodology. Monte Carlo simulation has been used for the departure process to determine passenger process permeability of large airport hubs in a system of interconnected airports. We show the relative impact of the registered traveler scheme on improving the security of the passenger departure process. The proposed approach would allow decision makers (a) to identify weakest links in a security chain; (b) to assess quantitatively the impact of deploying specific security technologies on the overall process security; and (c) to help choose the optimum technical solutions to achieve the security goals for a given process in an operational environment.