An Integrated IoT–AI–UAV Swarm Architecture for Intelligent Autonomous Airport Security

Airport security faces escalating challenges from perimeter intrusions, runway incursions, wildlife hazards, unauthorized drone activity, and cyber-physical threats. Conventional surveillance systems based on closed-circuit television (CCTV), radar, and human patrols provide essential monitoring capabilities but remain constrained by fragmented situational awareness, limited mobility, delayed threat verification, and high operator workload. Addressing these limitations requires architectural integration rather than incremental upgrades to individual technologies. This review develops an evidence-based five-layer IoT–AI–UAV swarm reference architecture that integrates sensing, coordinated autonomy, edge intelligence, human-supervised decision-making, and cross-layer cybersecurity within a unified airport-security ecosystem. The proposed framework is examined through three representative airport-security use cases—perimeter intrusion detection, wildlife hazard monitoring, and rapid-response surveillance using evidence from the reviewed literature. Cross-study synthesis indicates that multi-sensor fusion is essential for reliable detection of low-slow-small targets under heterogeneous operating conditions, onboard edge intelligence is necessary for time-critical response, and hybrid swarm coordination provides the most effective balance between centralized mission optimization and decentralized resilience under degraded communications. Human supervision forms a core architectural layer, supporting alert prioritization, workload management, trust calibration, and escalation control. The study identifies five key deployment barriers—battery endurance, communication resilience, airspace regulation, AI explainability, and human factors and proposes a phased research roadmap toward field-validated and certifiable airport-security systems. The principal contribution is a unified, operationally grounded IoT–AI–UAV swarm architecture tailored to the threat environment, regulatory constraints, and human-factors requirements of modern airport security.