A Building Block Apporach to Port Security

Abstract

With the ever present threat to commerce, both politically and economically, technological innovations provide a means to secure the transportation infrastructure that will allow efficient and uninterrupted freight-flow operations for trade. With over 360 ports of entry and 20 million sea, truck, and rail containers entering the United States every year, port facilities pose a large risk to security. Securing these ports and monitoring the variety of traffic that enter and leave is a major task. Currently, freight coming into United States ports is "spot checked" upon arrival and stored in a container yard while awaiting the next mode of transportation. For the most part, only fences and security patrols protect these container storage yards. To augment these measures, this research proposes the use of aerial surveillance vehicles equipped with video cameras and wireless video downlinks to provide a birds-eye view of port facilities to security control centers and security patrols on the ground. The initial investigation demonstrates the use of unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles as a viable method for providing video surveillance of container storage yards. This research provides the foundation for a follow-on project to use autonomous aerial surveillance vehicles coordinated with autonomous ground surveillance vehicles for enhanced port security applications.

Cost is a major issue for security deployments at shipping ports. This research also introduces a novel distributed control architecture that has eliminated the need for expensive management centers, thereby dramatically reducing the overall system cost. Fault tolerant, dynamically reconfigurable peer-to-peer networks of low-cost geographically distributed security consoles operating under the philosophy that any console should be able to control any system resource at any time seamlessly integrate video streams from the various port areas.

To accomplish this, a fully distributed building block approach to port security is demonstrated. Based on prior work accomplished in the design and fielding of an intelligent transportation system in the United States, building blocks can be assembled, mixed and matched, and scaled to provide a comprehensive security system. Network blocks, surveillance blocks, sensor blocks, and display blocks are developed and demonstrated in the lab, and at an inland port. The following functions are demonstrated and scaled through analysis and demonstration: barge tracking, credential checking, container inventory, vehicle tracking, and situational awareness. The concept behind this research is "any operator on any console can control any device at any time."