مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The challenges associated with maintaining a secure air travel system are increasing in scope and importance. Due to a sustained business globalization, turbulent regional crises, the current security threats, and an expansion of air travel services to unprecedented levels, today’s traveler flows are increasing (International Air Transport Association, 2016). Specifically, the proliferation of low cost air carriers and a clearer differentiation between the core and ancillary services offered by legacy carriers, the emergence of shared economy lodging/ground transportation business models at global scale (e.g., Airbnb, Uber), and the development of newer leisure destinations resulted in unprecedented leisure travel volumes. Moreover, the contemporary global business cycles and the development of attractive frequent traveler reward programs are creating new dynamics within business travel. In this context, the security organizations must allocate a limited amount of resources to safeguard the security of the increasingly interconnected global travel system and fend off threats (Wong and Brooks, 2015). Biometric systems play a critical role in this complex system of hardware, software, and business/administrative models, due to their ability to uniquely ascertain travelers’ identity (Morosan, 2011).

Characterized by higher accuracy relative to rival systems (Jain et al., 2011), biometric systems have been successfully deployed in a variety of air travel and related border control settings (Farrell, 2016). Importantly, the accuracy of biometric systems relative to rival systems facilitated the development of biometric-based trusted traveler programs, which increased the efficiency of air travel and border control traveler processing (e.g., Global Entry, Nexus, Sentri, TSA PreCheck). The success of such programs is predicated upon: (1) the opportunity to redeploy resources to screen travelers with unknown backgrounds (i.e., higher risk) and thus realize substantial resource savings (Kosner, 2014), and (2) the benefits (e.g., convenience, processing speed) offered to enrolled (i.e., trusted) travelers (Morosan, 2012). The tremendous recent progress made in the development of biometric systems and the travelers’ seeming acceptance of self-service technology facilitated the transcendence of legacy biometric systems into newer systems. Among those, biometric electronic gates (thereafter called “egates”) represent one of the latest solutions for automatic air traveler processing when entering national territories, accessing secure areas, and boarding commercial flights (Caldwell, 2015).

E-gates are biometric systems based on single- or multimodality biometric (e.g., face, fingerprint) and biographic (e.g., travel documents) information verification (Gohringer, 2015). Most e-gates have been deployed in border control settings, in airports in Europe and Asia, and the number of airports deploying e-gates is increasing (n.a., 2014). As the e-gate technology develops, the tasks addressed by e-gates are evolving as well. For example, adhering to contemporary newer “fast travel” initiatives, e-gates are currentlybeing tested at Bengalore airport in India to ascertain if they can extend the task environment from predominantly border control to streamline traveler processing in domestic travel (Bengaluru Airport, 2015). While collaboration among critical stakeholders (e.g., airports, airlines, government security agencies) is necessary, e-gates could improve the end-to-end experience of travelers and the security of the overall travel system by including multiple tasks within the same travel experience, such as check-in, luggage services, or boarding (Farrell, 2016).