Modeling the Performance of Border Inspections with Electronic Travel Documents

Increased security risk in international travel has resulted in the creation of new programs to determine the admissibility of foreign travelers at official ports of entry within a country. Primary program goals are improving border security and, at the same time, facilitating the flow of legitimate travelers. Major program requirements include the adoption of machine readable travel documents (i.e., passports, visas, etc.), the use of biometric identifiers, and the interoperability among multiple information systems for travelersy identity verification and background checks. Performance analysis of a border inspection system early in its development life-cycle is essential to predict its ability to meet established performance goals, to identify key performance drivers and potential bottlenecks and to suggest possible design improvements. This paper presents our experience with performance evaluation of a hypothetical inspection system. We adopt an analytical modeling technique based on layered queuing networks. Compared with similar studies which use extensive simulations, we observe that our methodology achieves comparably accurate results while being simpler and less costly