Our focus of this project is a look at passenger arrival process at security screening checkpoints at airports. For the purpose of our project, we analysed the dataset provided by the U.S customs and border protection, that monitors the flight processing times (wait times) for arriving flights and we chose the John F. Kennedy International Airport and Terminal 8 as it is the largest passenger terminal at JFK airport.

While the dataset provided intensive information on wait times, the dataset lacks information on inter-arrival times of passengers. The passenger arrival rate is dependent on the airlines departure schedules and distribution of passenger arrival times in the terminal, therefore we applied a general approach to the arrival process in terms of G/G/K queuing model. When processing the data, the data is given to us in binned format which represents a loss of data from the beginning.

Our analysis of waiting time distributions allow us to input parameters into the G/G/K queuing model as we attempt to use our data to inform a model, and obtain closed form approximations for performance metrics. We also found a significant difference in the waiting times of US and non-US citizens where the queuing model can be updated by splitting the queues into US and non-US citizens.