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MANAGING AIRPORTS TODAY May 2015 airportbusiness 41 Taking a holistic view helps unlock new efficiencies and cost-savings which may not be possible with segmented approaches which consider pre-security and post-security as two independent stages. An end-to-end review, however, requires that the airport, security services, ground handlers and baggage sys- tem integrators consider every aspect of how bags arrive at the right plane, at the right time. The TSA's three-tier approach to screening, combined with sorting technologies developed in the retail sector, could be the basis for a transformation in the way baggage is handled by airports throughout the United States. In the United States, baggage screening is typically carried out in a number of sepa- rate screening locations throughout an airport. The reasons for this are understandable: most airports were built before the need for height- ened security and so the screening process has been retro-fitted to the existing terminals and infrastructure. Often, the logical way to do this was to create three or four standalone security centers. This configuration minimizes the time that baggage has to spend on a conventional conveyor between the two main sections of the baggage handling process: from check-in to security screening and from screening to make-up. Using multiple screening locations, how- ever, means that each location needs suffi- cient screening capacity to cope with peaks in demand, and then additional screening machines to provide redundancy. In addi- tion, the space allocated for these screening areas is real estate that airports cannot use for other purposes. The replacement of multiple screening areas with a centralized area, fed by a high-speed tote transport system, offers a number of advantages, including a reduction in the number of screening machines that are required to provide the same capacity and 100 percent traceability of all baggage. FIFO The conventional approach to baggage han- dling is essentially a First-In, First-Out (FIFO) process. As bags are checked in, they are screened and sorted to their proper destination. This approach means that passengers have a fixed time-slot of about three hours before which they are not able to check in their lug- gage. During this time the loading gate for each individual flight has to be staffed by operators waiting for the next item of baggage to arrive on the departure carousel, together with bags for other flights, before loading the right bag onto the right ULD. Of course, some flexibility is provided by an "Early Baggage Store," which allows the baggage from the earliest passengers to be held pending loading onto the flight, but the process is essentially still one of pushing individual items of baggage through the system. A comparison of the process used by the retail sector reveals the inherent inflexibility in the conventional baggage handling process. The retail sector has developed process- es to manage the high-speed, high-capacity sorting needed to provide next-day delivery of B alancing the need for security screening against the fast and efficient handling of baggage is a constant challenge for airports of all sizes. The TSA introduc- tion of pre-screening of passengers for expedited, standard or enhanced security processing will enable airports to take a more holistic view of the entire baggage han- dling process and to combine enhanced safety with an improved baggage handling efficiency and throughput. The replacement of multiple screening areas with a centralized area, fed by a high-speed tote transport system, offers a number of advantages, including a reduction in the number of screening machines that are required to provide the same capacity. BEUMER Corporation