مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Under the international trend of globalization, international travel is frequent, and the number of people traveling for business and sightseeing is increasing rapidly (Yu and Huang, 2014). By 2027, the number of tourists in the Asia-Pacific region will increase by 45%, and this region will become the world’s largest air transport market (Boeing Company, 2007). This will lead to the development of global trade (Allroggen and Malina, 2014) for which the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (TTIA) will be a key hub, connecting northern Japan, South Korea, Beijing, and Southeast Asia’s Hong Kong and ASEAN members, all of which are roughly 2.5 h from TTIA in flight time. TTIA is located on one of the major eastewest routes between the United States and China. This prime location is a potential advantage for TTIA (Wang et al., 2011).

Taiwan opened regular direct flights to mainland China in 2008, promoting cross-strait economic exchanges and social interaction (Lin and Fu, 2014), which caused a record number of air passengers to travel between Taiwan and mainland China. According to Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) flight statistics (CAA, 2015), the number of flights at TTIA in April 2012 was 1.15 times higher than in September 2009. Therefore, the number of flights increased to 4,500 flights per month (Lu and Liu, 2014). Because the flow of international passengers has increased rapidly, immigration officers are essential for border security. The influx of passengers at TTIA has increased the workload for security officers, and the government did not timely increase the number of immigration officers to compensate for the shortage of manpower. The lack of immigration officers affects the stability of border operations and the management of immigration services. Therefore, airport immigration officials require proper human configuration to achieve stable border security operations.

Currently, most staffing research has focused on hospital nurses (Wong et al., 2014) and customer service staffing (Valls et al., 2009) as well as airport patrol and aircraft flight staffs (Farhadi et al., 2014; Soukour et al., 2013). No research has been conducted regarding airport immigration-related staffs. TTIA is the primary airport and provides services 24 h a day in Taiwan (Lin and Fu, 2014). Consequently, the airport immigration officers must rotate shifts. However, the long work shifts make immigration officers prone to fatigue. When fatigue increases, reaction times also increases, and attention and judgment decrease (Samaha et al., 2007; Takeyama et al., 2005; Winwood et al., 2006). Fatigue also affects the effi- ciency and stability of immigration officers (Milne and Kelly, 2014). Therefore, the proper configuration of immigration border security officers is worth exploring.