The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staffs and operates over 450 airports in the US. TSA has been using simulation to determine staffing requirements since 2005 and has recently completed a refresh of their manpower planning and scheduling system. The objectives of the effort were to replace the GPSS simulation engine, optimizer and user-interface (UI) to take advantage of current network-based systems technologies. The previous system was distributed to the 200+ users as a stand alone application. This presented maintenance, security and performance issues, especially during the annual budgeting process. This paper focuses on the creation and integration of the simulation engine which was required to replicate and improve on the existing GPSS model accuracy and performance. Additional considerations included providing TSA an easy-to-use simulation platform to maintain the simulation engine, make model and data edits and expand the use of simulation technology within TSA. INTRODUCTION Existing TSA System, User Environment and Motivation for ChangeTSA is responsible for ensuring the security of commercial air travel in the United States with passenger and baggage screening operations at over 450 airports. Each of these airports presents unique screening equipment, layout configurations, and passenger travel characteristics. In order to make sure TSA resources are used in the most effective manner, a simulation model was developed shortly after the crea-WLRQ RI 76$ WR PRGHO HDFK DLUSRUW ¶V XQLTXH VFUHHQLQJ RSHUDWLRQV 7KLV PRGHl proved to be an effective staffing tool and has gained the support of the airport administrations, airlines and budget oversight officials. The initial simulation model was developed using the GPSS simulation language. GPSS is an older simulation language and TSA found that it was becoming increasingly difficult to work with compared to some of the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages. As TSA reached the end of its contract support of the existing tool, a decision was made to create the next generation of the staffing model 3447 978-1-4244-9865-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
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