The Department of Homeland Security in February plans to hold an industry day to further explore potential plans with vendors of concepts and capabilities to enable travelers to screen themselves at airport checkpoints in order to improve security while allowing passengers to have an independent screening experience.
The announcement of the Feb. 12 industry day was combined with a draft statement of work outlining a potential contractor development effort for the Passenger Self-Screening solution, a new Request for Information (RFI) seeking industry feedback on the feasibility and capabilities necessary for the project, and a Power Point slide deck showing notional self-screening security systems and configurations.
The RFI follows an earlier one last fall which was a “quick shout out” to see who might be interested and what their ideas are, John Fortune, the program manager for the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Screening at Speed Program, tells HSR in an interview this month.
“We were very pleased with the response,” Fortune said, adding that “a lot” of companies put forth ideas “that encouraged us to push forward.” When the first RFI was released, the plan was to eventually issued a second one along with the draft work statement for industry to better think through how “they might bring this to reality,” he said.
A “number of industry submissions” from the initial RFI showed that the “capabilities we were looking for exist in the market and are available to be able to support the concept,” Matt Gilkeson, a branch manager with the Transportation Security Administration’s Innovation Task Force (ITF), tells HSR in a separate interview.
The upcoming industry day will allow DHS to have group and one-on-one interactions with various companies and also enable industry to engage with each other and even “team up” on the subject, Fortune said.
This is an “aim high type of program and we’re going to need to probably rely on some of the best and brightest working together to getting this pushed forward,” he said.
The Passenger Self-Screening effort is being led by the DHS S&T Directorate under its Apex Screening at Speed program, which issued an initial RFI last November soliciting potential solutions for passengers to screen themselves for weapons and explosives under their clothing while they divest their carry-on items at the checkpoint to save time and enhance their experience.
The S&T division is working with the TSA ITF on the self-screening effort. The ITF works with vendors to identify emerging solutions and demonstrate them in operational settings to better understand how well they work and generate better requirements. Examples include Automated Security Lanes that are located at around 130 airport checkpoint security lanes and advanced body scanners.
The draft statement of work also issued by DHS in January includes a potential project timeline that begins with an award this October leading to possible prototype fabrications and testing out to early 2025.
The RFI includes technical topic areas for industry to consider, including video analytics to ensure people are following the correct screening protocols, passenger imaging systems and related detection algorithms, metal detection system, and property imaging system and related algorithms.
Technical Challenges
The RFI and draft statement of work are broken out into the components that DHS is interested in “because we recognize no one has manufactured anything exactly like what we’re looking for but from that industry pulse we were able to identify that there is potential for a partnership with industry to move the ball forward in the self-screening concept,” Gilkeson said.
Fortune described the technical challenges in front of the concept on “at least” two levels, with one being advancement of the individual technologies and the other being systems integration.
“This is more than a systems integration problem,” Fortune said. “I don’t think just putting together what we have right now is going to be good enough. There’s going to have to be some advancements in the various technology strands to get components to where they need to be to ultimately put together a successful prototype.”
Millimeter wave technology is currently what is used for the body scanners that TSA uses at its security checkpoints and Fortune said that S&T is investing to improve this technology in areas such as antennas and wavelength ranges. Materials discrimination to identify whether an object in a passenger’s pocket is dangerous or not is another area of research that S&T is doing, which could make the self-screening systems “more powerful,” he said.
The system integration challenge goes beyond bringing together the individual technologies to include how each self-screening portal works with another, the operators, and the overall screening process, Fortune said.
Another challenge is cost reduction, Fortune said, adding that the overall effort is a “complex” project.
Fortune said that with responses to the second RFI he’ll be looking for how industry will address these various challenges and where do they need investment to improve their chances to be more successful.
The notional self-service screening renderings provided by S&T and TSA all appear to be private areas for passengers to divest their carry-on luggage while at the same time they either are being screened by metal detection and imaging systems or can immediately screen themselves with these systems after divesting their property.
“A successful solution would lead to a passenger friendly, intuitive screening process while improving security, accelerating passenger throughput, and reducing pat-down rates,” the draft work statement says. It adds that “This effort seeks to develop a comprehensive screening solution capable of utilizing the natural motion of the divesting passenger to achieve thorough inspection for concealed items and provide near real-time feedback to the passenger if additional divestiture is necessary. The passenger will only be allowed to leave the divestiture station if they have been cleared by this solution.”
The renderings are just ideas to get everyone thinking and “pique curiosity” but they are not prescriptive, Fortune said. How everything ultimately comes together in a future checkpoint experience is “up for discussion,” he said.
DHS is taking a “modular, building block” approach to the self-screening project to accommodate differences in size from one checkpoint to the next, Fortune said.
He believes that within five years coming up with integrated solutions, at least at the prototype level, for passenger self-screening is doable.
The Passenger Self-Screening effort, at least initially, is focused on solutions for the TSA PreCheck trusted-traveler screening lanes. The PreCheck population consists of travelers who voluntarily share personal information and biometrics to enable continuous vetting to ensure they are unlikely to represent a threat to the air transportation system. In return, these travelers receive benefits such as being allowed to leave their shoes on and laptops and liquids inside their bags to expedite the screening process.