Don't remember if I posted this or not. Long article...
COVER STORY November 2001
Technology to keep your cargo safe
Worried about cargo security in the light of recent terrorist
events? Peter Conway offers a guide to scanners and other
security products on the market.
It is a cliche that you can never have too much security, but that you
never know when you have too much either. In normal times,
convenience, cost and speed all tend to weigh against the introduction
of cargo security systems.
However, since 11 September, the equation has shifted the other way
as airlines, forwarders and cargo handlers all around the world all
wonder if their security procedures are tight enough. Ready to help
them are a range of security equipment manufacturers, all keen to
offer their version of the ultimate in security.
The obvious place to start is the scanning of cargo. One result of
recent events is that known shipper regimes are being reinforced all
around the world. Since that means cargo from unknown shippers will
need to be fully scanned, there is a sudden upsurge of interest in
x-ray scanning equipment.
There are a wide range of machines to choose from, made by
manufacturers such as PerkinElmer, OSI Systems and InVision in the
US, and by Heimann Systems and Xylon in Germany.
All have informative web sites with detailed product descriptions.
Many of these manufacturers concentrate particularly on passenger
bag screening, but their machines are also often suitable for freight
forwarders, shipper and express companies needing to scan cargo
under a metre or a metre and a half in width or height.
One company with a
particularly good
range of smaller
scanners specifically
aimed at cargo market
is Heimann Systems.
Its machines go as
small as the PS3010,
a machine for
detecting letter bombs
in mail, but for more
mainstream air cargo
it also offers its
HI-SCAN range, with
models ranging from
the 9075, with a
maximum cargo size
of 90x76cm, up to the
150150-300, which
can accommodate
1.44m wide by 1,7m
high euro pallets.
Heimann can also fit
units into trucks or
airport vehicles for
mobile scanning, and
has a ScanTrailer
system that can
silhouette-scan the
side of trucks.
Heimann Hi-Scan 145180 is a
universal X-ray system for bulky
items with tunnel dimensions of 1500
mm (61") width and 1500 mm (61")
height. It permits the inspection of
skeleton containers, pallets, very
large pieces of checked luggage,
parcels and crates.
OSI Systems, known for its Rapiscan 500 baggage screening range,
also produces a 540 series which is aimed at the standard air freight
pallet sizes. Bigger still are the systems in the Rapiscan 2000 series
range in size up to the 2243, a drive-through truck scanner used by
Customs on the Hong Kong border. Rapiscan systems cost anything
from $30-100,000 for 500 machines to $1m for pallet sized ones.
Arguably, the great granddaddy of air cargo scanners, however, is at
Schiphol Airport. Commissioned by Dutch Customs and opened for
use in October 2000, it can handle any container or pallet on a B747
freighter - that is containers up to eight metres long, 3.5 metres high
and 3 metres wide. It is a very high energy machine - 9 MEVs or nine
million electron volts, enough to penetrate a foot of steel. By contrast
the average baggage machine is 160kv (160,000 volts) and larger
cargo scanners around 450kv.
The Schiphol system is currently the only one of its kind in the world
and was built at a cost of $20 million by PerkinElmer Detection
Systems, a price which included all the buildings, offices and conveyor
systems needed (the machine, known as the CX900P, is so powerful
that it needs a specially designed building to house it).
Though built for scanning incoming cargo, and primarily aimed at
drugs, it is somewhat over-specified for that task, says Nick Gillett,
director technical marketing - cargo systems at PerkinElmer, and he
reckons explosives detection was always a part of the scheme. Early
in its life it did indeed seem to find some bombs in a pallet that had
started its journey in the Philippines. The alert proved to be a false
alarm, however - the shipment was of dummy bombs for an arms
exhibition in Spain.
PerkinElmer’s Linescan 229 can
handle pallets, crates, and
ULD’s.
After 11 September, at least
two airlines at Schiphol
asked Customs if they could
use the CX900P to screen
outbound cargo, a request
that was granted.
With a capacity of 20
three-metre containers an
hour, it would be impractical
for all the airport’s cargo to
be scanned in this way,
however.
Air cargo companies not at
Schiphol can gain access to
the same technology in the
shape of the Linescan 229
from PerkinElmer. It can
take pallets up to 2.44m
high and wide, and its 450kv
power is enough to get
through all but very dense
cargo (one exception would
be an entire pallet of dense
fruit such as pineapples). At
$600,000 it also costs a lot
less than the CX900P.
PerkinElmer also does even
smaller machines costing as
little as $70,000.
All these machines use x-rays to scan cargo. They are not explosive
detections systems as such, but merely highlight the different
densities of the materials inside the shipment and leave it to the skill of
the machine operator to note anomalies.
For passenger baggage, there is also another technology available -
CT, or computer tomography. InVision makes CT machines and has
sold them to airports around the world, including recently Ninoy
Aquino International Airport in Manilla.
CT scanning is the same technology used by hospitals to see inside
the human body: it uses a slowly revolving drum to take detailed slices
of the contents. But it is slow and expensive, and is used at most
airports only for scanning baggage from high risk profile passengers -
those who buy one way tickets or pay cash, for example.
For cargo, CT technology is probably not necessary anyway. As
Gillett points out, unlike the chaotic and random mix of passenger
baggage, cargo shipments often contain a lot of the same type of
object ordered in rows, and have a manifest describing what they
should contain.
“If you see anything that doesn’t match the manifest you are
suspicious,” Gillet points out.
Nevertheless, there may be an interest for cargo in a technology being
developed by OSI Systems with funding from the Federal Aviation
Administration in the US.
Top secret at present, it is a way to use ordinary x-rays to produce
smaller, faster images especially for explosives detection, and could
lead to a new technology within the financial reach of cargo handlers.
PerkinElmer-built cargo scanner at Schiphol airport can
handle any type of ULD.
Refinements available for conventional x-ray scanners include TIP or
Threat Image Projection. This is a technique designed to counter
boredom and complacency among operators of scanning machines.
The supervisor is able to insert dummy images of bombs or explosives
into baggage (or cargo).
When the operator spots it and raises an alarm, the system reveals
the image as a test. If the operator does not spot the dummy image, of
course, he or she might soon need to find another job. Most scanners
now offer this option.
German company Xylon also offers “scatter analysis” in its new
XES300 baggage system, a method which it says is more reliable at
detecting explosives. It too has an FAA grant to develop the
technology.
Gillett at PerkinElmer says that while it also offers scatter analysis as
an option, it is not convinced of its worth. “It produces interesting
images, but poor penetration,” he claims.
Last but not least, worth checking out on the explosives detection front
could be the IONSCAN range from Barringer Technologies of New
Jersey.
These are hand-held devices that use ion mobility spectrometry to
detect minute traces of substances in the air - down to a few trillionths
of a gram.
The company says the devices can detect a wide range of explosives
and narcotics - and they are a lot cheaper and more portable than an
x-ray scanner.
While checking cargo is inevitably be one of the more important ways
of maintaining security, attention is also being paid world-wide to the
question of access to air cargo buildings, particularly those with
airside access. It is all too easy in many airports for casual visitors to
enter warehouses from the truck dock, and potentially pass through
undetected to the ramp.
For Harold Frank, a Florida-based security consultant who advised
Challenge Air Cargo on its new highly secure cargo facility in Miami,
this is one of the weak links of airport security.
“Anyone can walk into a cargo terminal, and once inside, there are
lots of places for them to hide,” he points out.
Once inside, a terrorist could either plant explosives in cargo or gain
access to the ramp.
The problem facing Challenge when it designed its new Miami
terminal was theft and drugs smuggling - any hint of the latter earning
carriers heavy fines from the FAA. But many of the solutions are also
relevant to the current situation.
One was a sophisticated close circuit TV system using technology
from Sensormatic of Boca Raton, Florida, which covers all areas with
overlapping cameras and is controllable remotely by internet
(Challenge can move or zoom cameras in its Bogota terminal from
Miami).
Another is that unlike most other Miami terminals, the Challenge
facility is only approachable through a security gate. This simple
expedient of putting a fence between the road and the truck dock is
increasingly being adopted by airport cargo terminals around the
world. In Europe, Paris CDG is one airport that is considering fencing
all its cargo terminals.
Checking visitors at a gate is not enough, however. There is also the
question of making sure that those inside the building go only where
they are told.
CEM Systems, a Belfast UK-based company recently acquired by
Sensormatic, did the access control security for Ascentis, the new
British Airways World Cargo terminal at Heathrow.
Image processing offers reliable
inspections to detect contraband.
Drivers and other
visitors entering the
BAWC compound have
to either have smart
cards or be escorted,
but the staff too only
have access to those
parts of the building
relevant to their jobs
and then only at certain
times of the day.
Control of their
movements is by a
swipe card system.
According to Donna
McDonnell, director of
marketing for CEM
Systems, smart
features of the system
include the fact that
data on which
employees are allowed
where is not just held
on a central system, but
on the swipe card
readers themselves.
“That means if the central server goes down, the readers still work,”
she says. “It is also a lot quicker because entry can be validated
straight away.”
The system is also integrated with the CCTV system so that when
unauthorised activity is attempted, security staff immediately have a
picture of the affected area. They can then interrogate the person
concerned by intercom.
Lee Pernice, corporate spokesman for Sensormatic, says the internet
is making such access control systems increasingly sophisticated.
One perfectly feasible option, for example, is to have a single security
clearance for a particular individual for all a company's facilities
around the world, and to update, supervise and control access
privileges remotely by internet.
The trouble with such swipe card systems, however, is that it is
impossible to be sure that the person using a swipe card is its rightful
owner.
Terrorists could persuade a legitimate airport worker to lend their
card, or simply steal one. That is why there is a heightened interest in
biometrics - the use of eye scans, fingerprints or face-prints to validate
who a person really is.
What has put companies off implementing biometrics in the past has
been the cost McDonnell admits that it does add to the cost of access
systems. She is reluctant to be drawn on how much, but says as a
ballpark figure $2500 a door is not unreasonable. However despite
this cost, she says there has been a big jump in interest in such
systems since 11 September, a fact confirmed by Pernice.
“We were just at a conference on security here in the US and the
interest in biometrics such as eye scanning was unbelievable,” she
says.
Sensormatic, through CEM, is able to offer a full range of biometric
technologies. The problem with biometrics is which physical feature to
use to identify individuals. Fingerprinting has unfortunate associations
for many people and raises civil rights fears.
Face scanning or iris scanning (an invisible light is shone in the eye)
are often seen as less personally obtrusive, but Frank says these
technologies are more difficult to put into practice: a face scanner, for
example, has to be able to adjust to different heights.
He prefers fingerprinting - placing the finger onto a glass plate to be
scanned - as the most practical technology, and is recommending it to
the FAA for airport use. Implementing it in cargo could be easier than
in the passenger field.
Some of the problems of passenger airport use - checking fingerprints
quickly against a database of hundreds of thousands of possible
matches - would be less of a problem in air cargo, where workforces
are smaller.
“You can also correlate between a fingerprint and say a transhipment
document, which makes things a lot quicker,” Frank says. One
interesting example of this has been under test in the past year at
Chicago O’Hare.
Harry Wilkinson, a former trucking company owner turned security
products distributor, became interested in 1996 in the problem of how
air cargo terminals could be sure that a driver turning up with a truck
was who he said he was and not a terrorist or criminal.
Driving licences were not adequate, because it is relatively easy for
drivers in the US to obtain two or three licences under different
identities.
Vehicle and Cargo Inspection
Systems developed by SAIC.
Wilkinson interested the FAA and
the American Trucking
Associations Foundation in a
solution of his own devising, and
set up a company called
SecurCom to develop it.
The solution that has been under
trial on 600 participants and five
trucking companies at O’Hare
involves encoding both cargo
manifest information and the
driver’s fingerprint on a smart
card. On arrival at the air cargo
terminal, the security staff can
check the first against
computer-held records, and the
second against the driver’s own
fingerprint, read by a fingerprint
reader.
The beauty of the system is that
the fingerprint is held only on the
driver’s smart card, not on any
central database, easing civil
liberties fears.
Phase one trials of the system at O’Hare proved a success, and the
trial has now been extended to New York’s JFK and Newark airports.
Technology for such biometric solutions has existed for some years:
the events of 11 September may well now give them the impetus they
need to become mainstream and to persuade companies to make the
extra investment.
Another technology whose time may also have come radio frequency
tagging or RFID.
RFID tags are tiny computer chips attached to a coil of wire that can
be embedded in plastic or even in a barcode label and activated when
they pass through a magnetic field. Unlike barcodes, they do not have
to be pointing at the reader to be read, and they carry data which can
be read, altered or added to.
Pernice at Sensormatic says it is seeing more and more demand for
this technology in the supply chain, and reckons it could be the ideal
way to keep tabs on where cargo has been prior to arrival at the
airport.
“The tag can be programmed and written on as it goes down the
supply chain, so you have a record of where it has been,” she points
out. It is possible to programme tags so that certain data cannot be
erased, to avoid fraud or deception.
The problem with tags have been their cost - companies such as
Omron which make the tags say they could be produced for as little as
25 cents each for volume customers, but a true cost at present,
Pernice reckons, is around a dollar. In the past, that has seemed a
barrier, even to enthusiastic adopters of technology such as the
integrators.
With security now high on the agenda, it might well now seem less of
a hurdle.
Company
web site
YXLON
International
X-Ray GmbH
Heimann
Systems
CorpInVision
Technologies,
Inc
Barringer
Technologies
IncSensormatic
Electronics
Corp
Rapiscan
Security
Products, Inc
OSI Systems,
Inc
Perkin-Elmer
Detection
Systems
Science
Applications
International
Corp
SeCurcom
(O'Hare
Project)
Ionscan
www.yxlon.com
www.heimannsystems.com
www.invision-tech.com
www.barringer.com
www.sensormatic.com
www.rapiscan.com
www.osi-systems.com/security.htm
www.perkinelmerxray.com
www.saic.com
www.cargosafety.com
www.ionscan.com
payloadasia.com
steve |
