Publications

Determining the optimal time on X-ray analysis for transportation security officers

Speed, Ann S.; Silva, Austin R.; Trumbo, Derek T.; Stracuzzi, David J.; Warrender, Christina E.; Trumbo, Michael; Divis, Kristin

The Transportation Security Administration has a large workforce of Transportation Security Officers, most of whom perform interrogation of x-ray images at the passenger checkpoint. To date, TSOs on the x-ray have been limited to a 30-min session at a time, however, it is unclear where this limit originated. The current paper outlines methods for empirically determining if that 30-min duty cycle is optimal and if there are differences between individual TSOs. This work can inform scheduling TSOs at the checkpoint and can also inform whether TSOs should continue to be cross-trained (i.e., performing all 6 checkpoint duties) or whether specialization makes more sense.