Outgoing selectee rates at hub airports

Abstract

Abstract The selectee rate at an airport, or the fraction of originating passengers at an airport that have not been cleared by the computer-aided passenger prescreening system, may be useful in determining where to deploy certain baggage screening security devices. At hub airports, this rate alone does not capture the selectee rate of outgoing passengers, which consists of both originating passengers and transferring passengers. The impact of transferring passengers on the outgoing selectee rate is needed to optimally deploy baggage screening security devices at airports. This paper introduces a methodology for computing the outgoing selectee rates for a set of (hub and non-hub) airports and to quantify the impact of transferring selectees at airports. Different types of selectee rates are defined and relationships between selectee rates for a set of airports and within an airport are discussed. Based on these relationships, two approaches for computing the outgoing selectee rates are presented. The resulting formulations, the exact formulation and the approximate formulation, are illustrated and compared using several examples, including a real-world example with data from the official airline guide. The methodology introduced in this paper can be used to determine which individual airports pose the greatest threat from selectee passengers to the entire system of airports, hence can be used to aid in the deployment of baggage screening security devices at airports.