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arXiv · 2608.02950

Schedule-Informed Temporal Fusion Forecasting of Hourly Airport Security-Checkpoint Throughput

Abstract

Checkpoint staffing requires accurate forecasts of when screening demand will occur, yet flight schedules record departure times rather than passenger arrival times at security checkpoints. This study develops a framework that converts known flight schedules into temporally aligned signals for forecasting hourly checkpoint throughput. Using 2023-2024 Transportation Security Administration throughput data and Cirium Diio flight schedules for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, domestic and international seat capacity was distributed across pre-departure hours using truncated Poisson kernels. A Temporal Fusion Transformer then combined these schedule-derived arrival-intensity signals with historical throughput, scheduled activity, and temporal variables. Models were trained chronologically, with July-December 2024 reserved for testing, and evaluated against recurrent neural network and long short-term memory models across five random seeds. For direct six-hour forecasts, the proposed model achieved a weighted mean absolute percentage error of 9.33%, compared with 12.16% for the recurrent neural network and 11.37% for long short-term memory, while also producing the lowest errors during peak periods. With six-hour recursive updates, errors remained between 10.60% and 11.04% across 24-96 hour horizons, although longer horizons contained fewer valid forecast origins. By transforming scheduled departures into interpretable pre-departure screening-load signals without requiring passenger-flight matching, the framework supports advance staffing, lane-opening, and multiday checkpoint planning. Because observed throughput reflects realized processing rather than unconstrained arrivals, the forecasts should be interpreted together with local staffing, capacity, queue, and wait-time information.

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BibTeXRIS

Yinxiao Zhang, Sen Wang, Yi Gao. 2026-08-03. Schedule-Informed Temporal Fusion Forecasting of Hourly Airport Security-Checkpoint Throughput. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02950

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