Analysis of passenger queues at airport terminals

This paper presents an approach for analyzing passenger queueing processes at several stages of the service chain in airport terminals with a focus on passenger check-in systems. The queueing process at the check-in is driven by the arrival process of the passengers and the service process, including the desired technical and personnel resources. The key features of these systems are the time-dependent process of arrivals, generally distributed processing times, and systems with multiple servers. Time dependent service quality measures are analyzed, which are related to managerial decisions about the required number of check-in operators. Different analytical methods are reviewed to derive service quality measures for such dynamic and stochastic systems. Due to the dynamics in the demand and in the provided capacity, the use of standard queueing models is rather limited. A stationary backlog carryover (SBC) approach is developed to approximate the relevant performance measures. Numerical experiments demonstrate the reliability of these different approaches. Based on economies of scale, positive effects for common check-in operations can be shown