Technologies for Public Transport Security | PCP Contractors #4

The PREVENT PCP approach bases on Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP). It is an efficient and dependable method for contracting authorities to challenge market innovators through an open, transparent, and competitive process.

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The goal is to create new solutions for a technologically demanding mid- to long-term challenge. That is in the public interest and necessitates new research and development. The next Contractor developing a solution within the PCP process is Atos which describes its ideas as follows.

Nowadays, the detection of an unattended item still represents an important challenge for Public Transport Operators (PTOs) and has serious consequences on the security of people, goods and the disruption of the traffic, thus leading to delays in transportation and affects the security of people and the economy.

The current procedures to respond to such threats are very costly, time-consuming and need to be optimized. PREVENT aims to address this challenge via Video Intelligence by:

The expected solution will give the PTOs an enhanced security awareness through:

Learn more on Atos Computer Vision Platform.

At least four of the six Consortia competing in the Solution Design phase will be qualified to the next stage, during which the Contractors will develop a first prototype of a technology. To learn more about the PCP approach, please visit this subpage

Technologies for Public Transport Security | PCP Contractors #3

The main goal of PREVENT PCP is to conduct an innovative procurement of technologies which will allow timely automatic detection of potentially dangerous unattended items in public transport infrastructure.

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The PCP procedure that is undertaken within the project is about competition between six Contractors. Each of them proposed specific ideas of technologies augmenting the security in public transport. This time we encourage you to familiarise yourself with the concept of the Protecting Railway Transportation via Artificial Intelligence Consortium formed by Satways Ltd., imotion Analytics and Vicomtec.

PREVAIL will provide a novel solution for privacy-preserving, secure and controlled detection as well as monitoring of unattended items in public transportation organisations. The system will be materialized through an innovative combination of video analytics and converged security incident management system.

It will also enable its stakeholders (i.e., technical personnel, law enforcement, PTO, security personnel) to leverage the potential of video data analytics (monitoring of suspicious behaviour, extracting information on the suspicious events, sharing critical event analysis, information, and insights) within a secure and trusted environment. The system will support the operational and organisational aspects related to the privacy and legal requirements in Europe.

The system will be materialized through an innovative combination of video analytics and converged security incident management system, while enabling its stakeholders (i.e., technical personnel, law enforcement, PTO, security personnel) to leverage the potential of video data analytics (monitoring of suspicious behavior, extracting information on the suspicious events, sharing critical event analysis, information, and insights) within a secure and trusted environment, supporting the operational and organisational aspects related to the European privacy and European legal requirements.

The final PREVAIL system will provide scalable deployment of resources to support the dynamic demands of the different system components and will support technical and legal guarantees for protecting the privacy of the citizens.

At least four of the six Consortia competing in the Solution Design phase will be qualified to the next stage, during which the Contractors will develop a first prototype of a technology. To learn more about the PCP approach, please visit this subpage

Technologies for Public Transport Security | PCP Contractors #2

The first phase of the PREVENT PCP is underway. This is a crucial period that will create a basis for successfully development of technologies for public transport security.

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We continue the presentation of Contractors which were qualified to this stage of works. One of them is PreventUS A.I. The application was submitted by Ayvos A.S., a company on high-tech computer vision software industry that provides end-to-end solutions for several sectors and scenarios. What technology did they propose?

Object Counter is a method used to count the people detected in an area monitored by a camera. The PreventUs A.I. solution will be able to supply feature predictions that are used to calculate similarity scores between detection couplets. Those scores are then used to associate detections that belong to the same target.

IDs are assigned to similar detections, and different IDs are applied to detections that are not part of pairs. With AYVOS AODT (Any Object Detector and Tracker), any object in our real world will be able to be added for being detected and tracked in addition to known classifications like human, pedestrian, vehicle (*car, train, bus"), etc.

Videos from actual fields will be automatically collected via frame-cutting and cleaning infrastructure that is autonomous, and new item kinds may always be trained iteratively. The people who detected and followed up with AODT are counted in the regions monitored by cameras.

At least four of the six Consortia competing in the Solution Design phase will be qualified to the next stage, during which the Contractors will develop a first prototype of a technology. To learn more about the PCP approach, please visit this subpage

Technologies for Public Transport Security | PCP Contractors #1

PREVENT PCP has entered the first phase of the project and the awarded R&D providers have launched their works to provide technologies to augment security in public transportation.

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One of the awarded submissions is DAIMON. This consortium is led by CS GROUP France, a large industrial expert in security, crisis management, and defence system. It is completed by CERTH, a renowned research centre from Greece, and XXII Group, a French SME leader in the domain of AI video-analysis. The cooperation between those organisations resulted in the application for participation in the pre-commercial procurement process within PREVENT PCP that was successfully assessed by the project’s partners. How does the Contractor plan to increase the safety in public transport?

DAIMON aims to co-design & implement a platform for:

DAIMON will combine the most advanced innovations in AI-based video analytics with a novel crisis management system that will improve further detection, identification, and tracking performances. DAIMON will also exploit, and improve field-proven AI-based modules, developed by XXII for the robust detection of people and items in diverse environments.

These will be extended with ground-breaking Deep Learning visual analytics innovations, developed by CERTH for object-owner association, suspect tracking with (non)biometric methods and re-identification across CCTV. Additionally, DAIMON will integrate these capabilities in an enhanced crisis management system, built on CS GROUP’s Crimson platform, a ground-breaking product interoperating with legacy systems such as VMS and crisis management systems and widely adopted for the surveillance and protection of public sites and critical infrastructures.

At least four of the six Consortia competing in the Solution Design phase will be qualified to the next stage, during which the Contractors will develop a first prototype of a technology. To learn more about the PCP approach, please visit this subpage

PCP Phase 1 started and Awarded Tenderers announced at a meeting in Paris

The PREVENT PCP team concluded 2022 with the Plenary meeting & Kick-off of the Phase 1 of the project. It was hosted by RATP and took place in Paris on December 14-16.

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During the first day of the event, the project partners had the opportunity to participate in the social gathering which was accompanied by a visit to the RATP Security Control Centre. Then we moved to the next part of this meeting, which started with exploring the Paris metro network.

The main goal of PREVENT PCP is to conduct an innovative procurement of technology solutions that will allow timely automatic detection of potentially dangerous unattended items in public transport infrastructure. The developed technologies will be tested in four pilot sites. For this reason, the participants spent the night at the Châtelet Les Halles station to record a dataset, while the metro was closed for passengers. We created short videos representing the scenarios identified by the PREVENT PCP consortium and the User Observatory Group during the preparatory stage. Those materials will serve the developed technologies to learn and test algorithms for recognising abandoned luggage in the infrastructure of the pilot sites.

The second day was mainly dedicated to the issues related to the project implementation. Representatives of Work Packages presented the status of current works, along with the next steps and actions. Activities regarding the procurement, tendering and contract implementation were also elaborated. PREVENT PCP is divided into 4 Phases. We have already closed the Preparatory Stage and moved to the Phase 1: Solution Design. The consortium discussed a specific schedule for this stage and the communication plan with the contractors. Additionally, the planning of the Phase 2: Prototype Development was presented.

Last but not least, the third day was opened with welcoming the User Observatory Group members, who participated in the sessions on the current progress of PREVENT PCP. The welcome was followed by the official launch of the Phase 1 Kick-off meeting. The awarded Phase 1 consortia participating in the pre-commercial procurement process to provide technologies to be developed thorough the project were officially introduced. The companies presented themselves in an open session and then we proceeded to the presentation of their offered solutions in closed sessions with only the consortium and respective companies present.

We are very excited to announce that the awarded Contractors are:

Taking this opportunity, we would like to thank all companies that applied to compete in the PCP process (also the ones that were not selected for the next stage) for their interest and efforts in our project.

Stay tuned to learn more about the Contractors! We are going to introduce them and summarise their solutions on our online channels soon.

The PREVENT PCP GDPR Workshop [a new date]

GDRP Workshop RESCHEDULED to February 2023

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we see ourselves forced to reschedule the GDPR Workshop that was to be held on November 29 at 15:00 CET. The new date is foreseen in February 2023. We will inform ASAP once a concrete date is set.

Should you wish to be informed by email about the new date, please fill the form under this link.

Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience.

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How to make procurement processes that are, by design, compliant with data protection and cybersecurity regulations and best practices?

During the workshop expert speakers will discuss how the PREVENT PCP project has aligned itself with the requirements of the Europrivacy certification scheme in order to make procurement processes that are, by design, compliant with data protection and cybersecurity regulations and best practices.

We encourage you to join the workshop and learn more about GDPR-related aspects of PREVENT PCP. The event is open to the public and free of charge. The meeting will be broadcasted via Zoom.

A new date and registration possibility will be communicated as soon as possible.

The 2nd PREVENT PCP Newsletter

We are pleased to announce the release of our second newsletter! This issue focuses primarily on the first year of PREVENT PCP activity.

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We presented ongoing activities and summarised our efforts. We also discussed past and upcoming events related to the project. We were able to successfully prepare Calls for Tenders in accordance with PCP guidelines, launch the Open Market Consultations and organise a series of online meetings, among other things. The purpose of these webinars was to familiarise interested parties with the project’s scope and the PCP procedure.

Stay updated on our activities and growth by subscribing to our newsletter and visiting this link for the latest issue.

The current state of the PCP procedure

The main focus of the PREVENT PCP project is the procurement of technologies that will improve security in both public transportation and public areas. Let's take a look at the current status of the project team's work.

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The PREVENT PCP approach is based on Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP). It is an efficient and dependable method for contracting authorities to challenge market innovators through an open, transparent, and competitive process. The goal is to create new solutions for a technologically demanding mid- to long-term challenge that is in the public interest and necessitates new research and development.

To that end, the consortium initially published the Prior Information Notice (PIN) and launched the Open Market Consultation and information Webinars in eight languages: English, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, and Italian. The recordings can be accessed via this link.

The next stage of publicity was the preparation of the Call for Tenders in accordance with PCP guidelines, which included a detailed description of the tendering process, the evaluation procedure, and the criteria used to select subcontractors. On June 15th, 2022, the Call for Tenders was published in TED.

Except for the confidential documents, the entire documentation is available on the PREVENT website and has been added to the section "PCP Documentation." The confidential documents required the signature and submission of the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA, Tender Document No 2) and the EURI Template (Tender Document No 3), which can also be downloaded from the project's website, according to the procedure described in the Call for Tenders. Only Tenderers who signed and returned the aforementioned documents received the RESTREINT UE/EU RESTRICTED and/or confidential information and were invited to submit a Tender.

The project team also organised three webinars in conjunction with the publication of the Call for Tenders. These online meetings were organised  by the Lead Procurer, the Center for Security Studies (KEMEA) in collaboration with SNCF for potential suppliers to explain the scope of the PREVENT PCP project, the main aspects and expected timeline, as well as the process and procedure for submitting documents. The videos have also been uploaded and made public on our website and the PREVENT PCP YouTube channel.

Furthermore, we made it possible to ask questions to the consortium during online meetings, via the Contact Form on the website, and directly via e-mail. Suppliers were also given the opportunity to send questions about the NDA and the EURI Template to the Lead Procurer (as well as questions about the tender documentation and the process and RESTREINT UE/EU RESTRICTED).

We provided Matchmaking Form Solutions to encourage as many companies as possible to participate in the PCP process. Potential contractors could use this tool to find partners or consortiums, share information about their expertise, and define expectations for potential collaborators.

The deadline for the tender submission deadline was October 3rd, 2022. The opening of the tenders took place the same day at the premises of the Lead Procurer KEMEA who announced the receipt of eighteen tenders. More information about this milestone for our project can be found below.

The 3rd Information Webinar [VIDEO]

PREVENT PCP hosted the 3rd Information Webinar in order to provide in depth explanations of the process and procedure to submit proposal documents. This online meeting was held on July 28, 2022.

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Who?: Technology providers and research centers who specialize in AI-based Video Analytics, identification and tracking tools, and tech integration in standard crisis management and video management systems. 
What?: Procurement of R&D of new innovative solutions for Automatic Detection & Tracking of Unattended Items in Public Transport.
When?: 28th July 2022 - 10:00 to 11:30 CEST
How to?: Registration has been closed

A successful training for all stakeholders involved in PREVENT PCP

On 16th and 17th June PREVENT PCP held a training on pre-commercial procurement. Over two days, project partners, members of the user observatory group and public partners met in person and online to go through the essentials behind the methodology for the project.

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The topics covered :

The training started with a dive into the theoretical understanding through the methodologies and analysis before getting a good look at what PCP means practically and the key areas to address in today’s public transport sector.

The European commission has an idea in mind and it is innovation, which is why this an important time for us”, said Anabel Peiro Baquedano, Legal Procurement Consultant at CORVERS.

Now that the PREVENT PCP contract notice has been issued, the PCP process is now at its first crucial point. From now on, it is important for all stakeholders involved to understand the technical aspects behind the processes and procedures.

Don’t forget, all available resources are available on the webpage.