American Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2015, Vol. 3, No. 2, 63-71 Available online at http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajme/3/2/5 © Science and Education Publishing DOI:10.12691/ajme-3-2-5 BDR Modelling of Passenger Queues at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, Nigeria Nuhu A. Ademoh * , Anosike Esther Nneka * Department Of Mechanical Engineering, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria *Corresponding author: Nuhuadam@Yahoo.Com, stanosike@yahoo.com Received January 06, 2015; Revised February 09, 2015; Accepted May 04, 2015 Abstract A nation’s air industry is vital to her development as it offers inter-linkages for all the economic sectors. International airport of a country’s capital city acts as gateway and gives lots of first hand impression of her integrity. Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, the gateway to Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, faces problem of passengers queuing for boarding, departure and arrival at different rates due to ineffectiveness in management of travelers using the facility. This never gave travelers, particularly international passengers a good impression of the country. As part solution, this study developed a queuing model using Birth and Death Rate approach to simulate the problem and find enduring solution. Four air transport companies consisting two each of domestic and international operators that frequently use the facility was adopted as study samples. Their 2013 flight data were used to simulate model for validation. Result showed that in order to meet current daily passenger need each domestic airline required at least 5 aircrafts. Each international airline required one additional aircraft to effectively service the monthly average demands of 21,863 passengers. The system required 0.5 service factor and utilization factors of 0.4, 0.6 and 0.9 at 5% significance. Keywords: birth and death rate, modeling, airport, waiting line, service factor Cite This Article: Nuhu A. Ademoh, and Anosike Esther Nneka, “BDR Modelling of Passenger Queues at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, Nigeria.” American Journal of Mechanical Engineering, vol. 3, no. 2 (2015): 63-71. doi: 10.12691/ajme-3-2-5. 1. Introduction Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport (NAIA) is located at Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city. It operates both domestic and international terminals. As a gate way to Nigeria’s capital, it experiences massive traffic of people arriving to and departing out of the facility for official, commercial, business and personal activities. Though the industry has witnessed tremendous growth in the past years, continuous population growth/urbanization with its attendant increase in official and other activities has drastically raised the demand for air transport services in Nigeria (Odufuwa, 2008 and Ogwude, 1986). This has put pressure on the industry for state of art logistic management system. Inadequacy in availability of such systems has forced the industry to face problems of travelers queuing for boarding, departures and arrivals at NAIA, Abuja. Queuing in the airport has become very complex to solve manually due to the patterns and irregularities in the arrivals, departures and service process. As the system has less ability to promptly service the arrivals and departures rowdiness/randomness occur resulting to some waiting lines. According to Mehri et al (2009), queuing manifests at arrival, service facilities and actual waiting lines. These can be modeled for solutions based on performance evaluation metrics that include flight delays, cancellations and passenger delays (Subramanian 2007). In NAIA system waiting is consequent to irregularity in service for large user’s demands for cargo handling, ticket clearance, departure and arrival. Queuing for service is made worse during airlifting of hajj pilgrims by which time passengers sleep in Nigerian airports awaiting flight. Aftermath of the cumbersome services is that most travelers through NAIA are stressed up and uncomfortable giving bad image to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). As a part solution to this problem, Ademoh and Anosike (2014) used Multi Server approach to develop queuing modeling to predict demands of travelers using NAIA and recommended that more aircrafts were needed to effectively serve both its international and domestic wings. The main aim of this work is to develop an alternative queuing modeling using the birth and death rate (BDR) approach to predict and solve waiting line problem at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja. The objectives are to adopt historical data used in previous work by Ademoh and Anosike (2014) to simulate the newly developed BDR queuing modeling for prediction of passengers’ arrival and departure rates; determine service level of performance; harmonize passenger arrival/departure handling facilities and to cross compare the result with that of previous related work. The significance of the work as a follow-up to work of Ademoh and Anosike (2014) is that it would confirm the practical solution to the waiting line problem of NAIA and to justify the better method of the two modeling approaches to precisely solve the problem