Full Body Scanners at the airport

Introduction

The aviation security system is critical to the overall security of every nation. In the United States, there are more than 400 commercial airports and over 700 million passengers flying annually. The current security system ensuring the safety and security of these airports and passengers consists of various layers of defense. These include intelligence inputs, passenger prescreening, passenger checkpoint screening, checked baggage screening, air cargo screening, airport access control, airport perimeter security and in-flight security. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been continuously implementing significant security improvement measures over last 40 years. In spite of continuous efforts to improve the aviation security, the vulnerability of the overall system was exposed by the catastrophic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These tragic incidents have triggered a huge body of research literature focusing on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the aviation security system. The airport security models and techniques focusing on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the aviation security system have seen a large number of industrial engineering applications. In this thesis, we study a problem pertaining to the layers of passenger prescreening and passenger checkpoint screening. (CBS 60 Minutes 2011)

A typical U.S. airport has two kinds of passenger checkpoint screening lanes: a normal lane and a selectee lane which has enhanced scrutiny. The selectee lane is not efficiently utilized in some airports due to the small number of passengers selected to go through it. In the prevailing practice, only the passengers classified as “selectees” are directed to the selectee lane. Although all selectees go through the selectee lane, the selectee lane may not be efficiently utilized in some airports. Previous research (Nie, 2008) has suggested a selectee lane queueing design model that leads to more efficient resource utilization than the current practice, assuming that the model's assumption of steady-state arrivals is valid. Nie's model is based on an objective function that maximizes the passenger checkpoint screening system's probability of accurate alarm. It assumes that passengers are classified into various risk classes via a passenger prescreening system. The model considers how to assign passengers from different risk classes to the selectee lane based on how many passengers are already in the selectee lane. In reality, passengers at an airport do not arrive via a time-homogeneous Poisson process and the queue rarely reaches steady-state conditions, so the assumptions of Nie's model are not valid in practice (Canter 2005).

Now a new body scanning has been introduced at many airports. These body scanners have some advantages and disadvantages, as well. In this research paper, we are going to discuss this new technology in details.

On Christmas Day, there was an unsuccessful attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a plane. This plane was flying to Detroit, and there were divers passenger on it. There was many chances that this terrorist would succeeded in his attempt has sparked many new calls in the united states of America and many other Eropean countries. In this attempt, Umar was carrying explosive powder ...