Passenger Screening Research Articles

Night work, circadian rhythm, and cognitive performance: A field study with airport security screeners

The effects of circadian rhythms and night work on performance have been extensively studied using standardized, non-work-related tasks in laboratory settings. However, field research on work performance is scarce in this domain. This study addresses this gap by analyzing four million behavioral responses from 1437 security officers at an international airport. We compared threat detection performance during the routine security screening of passengers' baggage X-ray images across night shifts (shift starting between 0:00 and 2:59), early morning shifts (starting between 3:00 and 5:59), and standard morning shifts (starting between 6:00 and 7:59). Processing times followed the circadian rhythm of attention found in laboratory studies, indicating that the rhythm affects real-life work performance. False alarm rates (i.e. false target present responses) were slightly higher during night and early morning shifts than during standard morning shifts, with no significant difference in the security-relevant hit rates (i.e. true target present responses). Furthermore, we found no performance differences between night work and early morning shifts, suggesting that both can disrupt employees’ natural sleep patterns with implications on performance.

Tanzania's first Marburg Viral Disease outbreak response: Describing the roles of FELTP graduates and residents.

Viral Haemorrhagic Fever Outbreak presents a significant public health threat, requiring a timely, robust, and well-coordinated response. This paper aims to describe the roles of the Tanzania Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program (TFELTP) graduates and residents in responding to Tanzania's first Marburg Viral Disease (MVD) outbreak. We performed a secondary data analysis using a range of documents, such as rosters of deployed responders and the TFELTP graduate and resident database, to count and describe them. Additionally, we conducted an exploratory textual analysis of field deployment reports and outbreak situational reports to delineate the roles played by the residents and graduates within each response pillar. A total of 70 TFELTP graduates and residents from different regions were involved in supporting the response efforts. TFELTP graduates and residents actively participated in several interventions, including contact tracing and follow up, sensitising clinicians on surveillance tools such as standard case definitions, alert management, supporting the National and Kagera Regional Public Health Emergency Operations Centres, active case search, risk communication, and community engagement, coordination of logistics, passenger screening at points of entry, and conducting Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) assessments and orientations in 144 Health Facilities. The successes achieved and lessons learned from the MVD response lay a foundation for sustained investment in skilled workforce development. FELTP Training is a key strategy for enhancing global health security and strengthening outbreak response capabilities in Tanzania and beyond.

COVID-19 passenger screening to reduce travel risk and translocation of disease.

Aviation passenger screening has been used worldwide to mitigate the translocation risk of SARS-CoV-2. We present a model that evaluates factors in screening strategies used in air travel and assess their relative sensitivity and importance in identifying infectious passengers. We use adapted Monte Carlo simulations to produce hypothetical disease timelines for the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 for travelling passengers. Screening strategy factors assessed include having one or two RT-PCR and/or antigen tests prior to departure and/or post-arrival, and quarantine length and compliance upon arrival. One or more post-arrival tests and high quarantine compliance were the most important factors in reducing pathogen translocation. Screening that combines quarantine and post-arrival testing can shorten the length of quarantine for travelers, and variability and mean testing sensitivity in post-arrival RT-PCR and antigen tests decrease and increase with the greater time between the first and second post-arrival test, respectively. This study provides insight into the role various screening strategy factors have in preventing the translocation of infectious diseases and a flexible framework adaptable to other existing or emerging diseases. Such findings may help in public health policy and decision-making in present and future evidence-based practices for passenger screening and pandemic preparedness.

The value of universal screening for COVID-19 cases on cruise ships during outbreaks.

To describe the impact of universal screening for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on passengers on cruise ships docking in Sydney, Australia, during 2022 that experienced a significant outbreak of COVID-19. Type of program or service: Cruise ship disease surveillance Methods: Case series, based on analysis of cruise ship voyages where universal screening of passengers was requested by a NSW health authority and undertaken by the cruise ship. Of 111 voyages in 2022, three fit the definition for this study. Universal screening during these voyages resulted in the detection of up to 1.8 times the number of existing COVID-19 cases, increasing attack rates of the three voyages from 14% to 24%; 13% to 28%; and 3% to 8% respectively. Case demographics showed an even gender distribution, with a majority 70 years or older. Asymptomatic case percentage ranged from 2% to 54%, with age and gender not associated with symptomatic status. Almost all cases were reported as being fully vaccinated. Genomic testing of cases showed multiple lineages of COVID-19 circulating in all three voyages. Public health authorities, the cruise industry and passengers should be aware that a large number of unidentified cases of COVID-19 may disembark from a cruise ship that has experienced a large outbreak of the virus. These cases can seed the infection into vulnerable communities. Universal screening as part of the response to a significant outbreak will help identify cases and limit the spread of COVID-19.

Understanding passenger travel choice behaviours under train delays in urban rail transits: a data-driven approach

The analysis of passenger travel choice behaviours under train delays has become a crucial topic in research on urban rail transit operation management. In this paper, we focus on analysing travel choices of affected regular passengers under train delays by utilizing the data collected through an automatic fare collection (AFC) system along with train delay log records. Along this line, we propose a data-driven four-stage framework for studying regular passengers’ responses under delays, consisting of data profiling, regular passenger screening and travel patterns extraction, affected regular passenger identification, and affected passenger behaviour prediction modelling. Using a real-world case of the Shenzhen Metro in China, we conduct extensive experiments for method validation and feature insights analysis. The proposed framework could provide a microscopic view of passenger travel behaviours under train delays for fine prediction and exhibit a possibility for multi-source heterogeneous data mining in passenger behaviour analysis and train delay-related tasks.

Price Discrimination in International Airline Markets

Abstract We develop a model of inter-temporal and intra-temporal price discrimination by monopoly airlines to study the ability of different discriminatory pricing mechanisms to increase efficiency and the associated distributional implications. To estimate the model, we use unique data from international airline markets with flight-level variation in prices across time, cabins, and markets and information on passengers’ reasons for travel and time of purchase. The current pricing practice yields approximately 77% of the first-best welfare. The source of this inefficiency arises primarily from private information about passenger valuations, not dynamic uncertainty about demand. We also find that if airlines could discriminate between business and leisure passengers, total welfare would improve at the expense of business passenger surplus. Also, replacing the current pricing that involves screening passengers across cabin classes with offering a single cabin class has minimal effect on total welfare.

Weakly Supervised 2D Pose Adaptation and Body Part Segmentation for Concealed Object Detection.

Weakly supervised pose estimation can be used to assist unsupervised body part segmentation and concealed item detection. The accuracy of pose estimation is essential for precise body part segmentation and accurate concealed item detection. In this paper, we show how poses obtained from an RGB pretrained 2D pose detector can be modified for the backscatter image domain. The 2D poses are refined using RANSAC bundle adjustment to minimize the projection loss in 3D. Furthermore, we show how 2D poses can be optimized using a newly proposed 3D-to-2D pose correction network weakly supervised with pose prior regularizers and multi-view pose and posture consistency losses. The optimized 2D poses are used to segment human body parts. We then train a body-part-aware anomaly detection network to detect foreign (concealed threat) objects on segmented body parts. Our work is applied to the TSA passenger screening dataset containing millimeter wave scan images of airport travelers annotated with only binary labels that indicate whether a foreign object is concealed on a body part. Our proposed approach significantly improves the detection accuracy of TSA 2D backscatter images in existing works with a state-of-the-art performance of 97% F1-score, 0.0559 log-loss on the TSA-PSD test-set, and a 74% reduction in 2D pose error.

Nominal Body Contour Reconstruction for Millimeter-Wave Characterization of Suicide Bomber Explosives

In order to improve the speed of passenger screening while preserving the effective capability to detect more sophisticated threats, airport security imaging systems must be able to accurately characterize concealed body-worn objects. In addition to improving the passenger experience, this system capability will enhance airport security for the traveling public. This article presents a real-time, fully automatic algorithm for the wideband millimeter-wave (mm-wave) radar reconstruction of the nominal human body contours, even in the presence of an affixed weak dielectric object or when a portion of the body cross section is not captured by the imaging scanner. The algorithm extracts the main contours from a noisy collection of 3-D reconstructed reflectivity and approximates the nominal human body cross section via fitting a low-order angular Fourier series. This important step is essential for precise characterization of concealed body-worn explosives. A ranking algorithm is developed as a metric for the nominal body reconstruction accuracy. We verify the developed algorithm by applying it to the actual images of the high definition–advanced imaging technology (HD-AIT) system, a laboratory prototype mm-wave scanning system developed recently by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The reconstructed body contours may be used to estimate the electric permittivity of the concealed person-worn objects.

Assessing the risk of spread of Zika virus under current and future climate scenarios

Zika virus (ZIKV) may cause severe microcephaly in newborn babies and Guillain-Barré syndrome in some adults. In recent decades, its range has expanded in 86 countries. There are two ecologically and evolutionarily district cycles: urban cycle and sylvatic cycle. This work aimed to estimate the urban and sylvatic cycle areas of ZIKV throughout the world. The occurrence records of vectors, non-human primate hosts, and ZIKV were collected. We chose historical climate data, predicted vectors distribution, human population density, and elevation data as the variables to fit the maximum entropy model (MaxEnt). Current risk area and future prediction were performed with global climate models (GCMs) and shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). Predicting the ZIKV risk area would help tailor related control strategies. The results indicated that 16.6% of the world’s landmass (except Antarctica) is a risk area in the urban cycle. Approximately 6.22 billion people (78.69% of the global population) live in the risk area, with the vast majority in South Asia, tropical Africa, South America, North America, and countries around the Mediterranean Sea. Future climate change decreases the risk area of ZIKV. This study also suggested that the sylvatic cycle happened between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The overlap region of the urban and sylvatic cycles could be hotpots that ZIKV spill from the sylvatic to the urban cycle. It is indicated that long-term passenger screening, mosquito surveillance, and control are necessary.

Aviation security automation: The current level of security automation and its impact

Passengers dream of using air travel without experiencing the mandatory security and identity checks. The way to make this dream come true is based on the automation of security processes. Since there have been many attacks in the aviation sector, especially on airports and airplanes, the requirements for security systems and their development have risen sharply, with the consequence that passengers have to accept increasingly deeper intrusions into their privacy. To ensure these requirements, passenger and baggage screening systems must meet the highest standards. In this paper, we present opportunities, risks and impacts of a fully automated security system on passengers. To this end, we examine processes at the airport and their current level of automation with a focus on security. Using Airport 4.0 as an example of strong digitalisation at airports, the degree of complete digitalisation, which serves as the basis for automation, is evaluated in the context of airports. Digital transformation defined by Airport 4.0 affects mainly the use of technologies for process automation such as eg identity management, and passenger involvement such as eg passenger preferences. Thereby, the prerequisites for digitalisation, concerning effort and costs, are elaborated. Automation through digitalisation is examined using the example of the application of Artificial Intelligence. Furthermore, we evaluate the progress of automation in various areas by way of examples. The existing degree of digitalisation and automation, especially through the use of artificial intelligence, makes the realisation of the dream of using aviation without even noticing the mandatory security and identity checks seem closer. However, digitalised systems may be subject to cyber attacks manipulating eg databases containing biometric data. Therefore, future work will address cyber security on the one hand, and on the other, a method that applies the power of Artificial Intelligence to the control of all parts of the security infrastructure, such as cameras, access controls and border controls. Automation combined with Artificial Intelligence can be trained to detect hidden correlations that reveal potential threats.

Impact of New Technology Application on Passenger Screening Throughput

Impact of New Technology Application on Passenger Screening Throughput

Airline Safety measures to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic that affect the confidence of passenger’s decision making to travel with domestic low-cost airlines during the pandemic

The airline business is one of the businesses which have heavily been impacted from the COVID-19 pandemic. International travel restriction due to border closing policy in some countries, restricted mobility, and social distancing have significantly ceased the aviation industry. Departments concerned have issued both short-term and long-term safety measures for the prevention and control the spread of the infection. Several preventive measures have been proposed.The purposes of this research is to study the Airline Safety Measures to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) affecting the confidence of passengers in decision making to travel with domestic low-cost airlines during the pandemic. The quantitative and qualitative were conducted by online questionnaires. 400 Sample groups from passengers of 4 low-cost airlines which operated domestic flight in Thailand, 152 from Thai Air Asia, 86 from Thai Lion Air, 96 from Nok Air and 66 from Thai Viet jet. The descriptive statistical analysis included Pearson’s simple coefficient and multiple regression analysis were applied. The results found that the most significant factors of safety measures to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) affecting the confidence of passengers in decision making to travel domestic flight with low-cost airlines during the pandemic were cabin density control measures, passenger hygiene measures, passenger screening measures, pre-boarding measures, aircraft preparation measures and service personnel hygiene measures respectively. Touch less technology should be implemented in all activities related to the air transportation travel process for preventing the spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Screening of Asymptomatic Passengers’ Departure from Qatar: A Retrospective Observational Study

Screening of Asymptomatic Passengers’ Departure from Qatar: A Retrospective Observational Study

Feasibility of Reducing Operator-to-Passenger Contact for Passenger Screening at the Airport with Respect to the Power Consumption of the System

So far, airport security screening has only been analysed in terms of efficiency, level of service, and protection against any acts of unlawful interference. Screening procedures have not yet addressed the need to limit operator-to-passenger contact. However, the pandemic situation (COVID-19) has shown that it is a factor that can be a key protection for the health of passengers and operators. The purpose of this paper was to analyse the feasibility of reducing contact between operators and passengers in the airport security screening system by process management with respect to the power consumption of the system. Experimental research was conducted on a real system. A computer simulation was applied to estimate system performance and power consumption. The paper identifies the important findings that expand upon previous knowledge. The results showed that there are two key factors: the experience of operators and proper system structure. These factors can significantly reduce the number of operator-to-passenger contacts and, in parallel, provide lower energy consumption of the system. The results obtained in this article showed that proper management improves the process by up to 37%. This approach expands the World Health Organization’s policy of prevention against COVID-19 and helps to ensure sustainable process management.

Barriers and Facilitators to COVID-19 screening at Jaipur International Airport, India.

Airports pose a possible threat in facilitating global disease transmission within the community which may be prevented by rigorous systematic entry-exit screening. Rajasthan Government has taken precautionary action at Jaipur International airport by screening passengers. The present article describes the entry-exit screening along with stakeholder perception on the barriers and facilitators associated with the screening. Secondary data was obtained from the Rajasthan Medical & Health Department team to categorize passengers for risk of COVID-19. A mix-method inductive-deductive thematic analysis was conducted. A total of 4565 passengers (Males=4073 and Females=492) with 23 suspected cases were screened during an outlined period of declaration of Pandemic to Lockdown in India (11 th to 24 th March 2020). The mean age of passengers was 40.95 ± 7.8 years. The average screening time per passenger was 2-3 minutes with a load of 25-90 passengers per team per flight. Fishbone analysis of screening revealed barriers like poor cooperation of passengers, masking symptoms, apprehension, and stigma related to quarantine. Inadequate human resources and changing guidelines overburdened healthcare providers. Perception of risk, and social responsibility of travelers together with supportive organization behavior act as facilitators. Overall, groundwork on airport screening was insightful to propose key action areas for streamlined screening in limiting transmission.

A multi-level weighted alarm security system for passenger and checked-baggage screening

Persistent and ever-changing threat of terrorism has led to the evolution of security systems in the air transportation industry. Passenger and checked-baggage screening prior to boarding an aircraft has become a priority for the airport security system. We propose a two-stage screening system by integrating the passenger prescreening and a multi-level checked-baggage screening. Based on the concept of the weighted k-out-of-n system, we introduce an integrated weighted alarm security screening system for a multi-level baggage screening system, where the system alarms when the total weight of its working levels is greater than a predefined system alarm threshold. To improve the security and efficiency of aviation systems, two optimization models are formulated to enhance the detection of possible threats in the passenger and baggage screening with consideration of the system life cycle cost. The optimal solutions of the threshold values are obtained for screening technologies and passenger classes to achieve the maximum security and efficiency. Numerical analysis is implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage screening system.

Determining the nominal body contour image using wideband millimeter-wave radar for characterizing person-worn threats

AbstractPrecise characterization of concealed person-worn objects will speed up the passenger screening process by reducing the rate of nuisance alarms, while also enhancing the airport security imaging systems. This paper presents an automatic, real-time method for wideband millimeter-wave radar identification of the nominal surface contours of the human body – even with affixed foreign objects or when a segment of the body cross-section is not captured by the radar – without relying on the body's bilateral symmetry. The developed method is verified experimentally when applied to the actual images generated by a laboratory airport scanning prototype developed recently by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Our method uses the noisy collection of radar cross-section reflectivity data to extract the main contours and estimates the nominal body surface cross-sections through fitting a small-term Fourier series of circumferential variation. This is a necessary step for accurate characterizing of concealed terrorist threat objects affixed to the body.

A Stepwise Approach to Inbound Passenger Management at a COVID-19 Temporary Medical Observation Site.

ObjectiveTo implement epidemic prevention among entry personnel, Shanghai has launched a number of Medical Observation Sites (Observation Site) for which high expectations are set. Ours is one such Observation Site.MethodsAs part of a novel project, we did not have any previous experience to use as reference. Despite some challenges, we achieved satisfactory outcomes by establishing a stepwise approach to inbound passenger management, including the division of the working area of the Observation Site, dynamic management of the rooms, closed-loop management of the isolated personnel.ResultsAs of May 14, 2020, a total of 42 Observation Sites were operational in Pudong New Area. The following are the detailed descriptions of our Temporary Medical Observation Site set up and work flow.ConclusionEarly screening of inbound passengers as well as prompt and dynamic management of information about passengers’ close contacts play an active role in preventing an influx of cases. As a pilot program, we have a model that is effective despite some limitations.

Reading the Human through Robots

Reading the Human through Robots

Capacity of transportation and spread of COVID-19-an ironical fact for developed countries.

The widespread epidemic of the COVID-19 in developed countries such as Europe and the USA has sparked many speculations. What factors caused the rapid early pandemic of the COVID-19 in developed countries is the main goal of this study. We collected the main disease indicators and various environmental and economic factors in 61 countries around the world. Our results show that the number of cases is positively correlated with the country’s GDP. We further analyzed the factors related to the spread of the disease. They indicate a strong positive correlation between the total patient numbers and the number of airline passengers, with an r value of 0.80. There is also a positive correlation between the number of car ownership and the total patient, with an r value of 0.35. Both the flight passengers and car ownership contribute 66% to the number of total patients. The total death numbers and the number of airline passengers are positively correlated, with an r value of 0.71. A positive correlation between the number of car ownership and the total deaths is with an r value of 0.42. The total contribution of both the flight passengers and car ownership to the number of total deaths is 57%. Our conclusion is that the main cause of the coronavirus pandemic in developed countries is related to the transportation. In other words, the number of travelers determined the early coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen restrictions and screening of passengers at airports, especially international airports.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-021-12765-5.