Summer is usually a quiet time of the year, but not for the PREVENT PCP team. Our representatives visited 4 premises of Contractors, which are competing in a PCP process. We are satisfied with overall progress, but those meetings were crucial from the project’s perspective.

The main focus of PREVENT PCP is the procurement of technologies that will improve security in both public transportation and public areas. To achieve expected results, we rely on a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) approach. It is an efficient and dependable method for contracting authorities to challenge market innovators through an open, transparent, and competitive process.

At the end of 2022, the project team selected 6 Contractors composed by tech companies which entered the Solution Design Phase. They had to prepare plans covering multiple aspects related to technical issues, commercialisation, innovation and data management, ethics, risk management, GDPR and IPRs management plan. After the mentioned stage, the Call off for Prototype Development Phase was launched. After a thorough evaluation process, 4 tenderers were awarded with a contract:

• DAIMON Consortium – CS GROUP France, CERTH, XXII Group
• PREVAIL Consortium– Satways Ltd., Imotion Analytics, Vicomtech
• BULL SAS – Bull SAS (Atos)
• PANOPTES Consortium – Herta Security S.L., ChapsVision, ACIC SA

One of the next steps were above-mentioned visits, which were organised in July at the Contractors premises. The main reason was to test algorithms that are developed under the PCP process. They should be capable to respond to the main challenges identified by PREVENT PCP: unattended items identification and tracking of its owners.

These tests helped assess the progress of the current phase. We evaluated how the Contractors implemented multiple features, such as classification, association, re-identification, unattended item alerts and tracking of the owners. The project team provided feedback that will be considered before the installation of the solutions in SNCF premises in August. The practical evaluation of the prototypes, installed and connected to a limited number of SNCF cameras in Paris Nord station is planned for September and October 2023.

During the visits, the PREVENT PCP Consortium used datasets recorded with volunteers to test the algorithms. The results are very interesting and complement comments provided to the Contractors during the last Progress Meetings.

Check out our website and social media channels for updates. Soon we will publish news about both the practical tests of the technology prototypes and other activities currently undertaken by the PREVENT PCP team.

The PREVENT PCP plenary meeting in Barcelona was held on June 8 and 9, 2023 at the Provença Station in Barcelona. The key information is the Consortium officially announced to the successful Contractors the start of Phase 2 of the pre-commercial procurement of technology solutions.

They will allow timely automatic detection of potentially dangerous unattended items, identification and tracking of perpetrators, and will include an advanced crisis management system. The start of Phase 2 wasn’t the only objective of the event. Additionally, during the plenary meeting we summarised the current progress of specific Work Packages and provided the members of the User Observatory Group with an update on the PCP process.

The Call off for Phase 2 was launched on April 19, 2023. The deadline for submitting offers was May 8. All five successful Contractors of the Phase 1 submitted their offers. They were evaluated by the KEMEA Procurement Board, Technical Management Committee and Procurement Evaluation Committee. Finally, four tenderers were awarded a Phase 2 contract:

• DAIMON Consortium – CS GROUP France, CERTH, XXII Group
• Protecting Railway Transportation via Artificial Intelligence Consortium – Satways Ltd., Imotion Analytics, Vicomtech
• BULL SAS – Bull SAS (Atos)
• PANOPTES Consortium – Herta Security S.L., ChapsVision, ACIC SA

The Prototype Development Phase (Phase 2) will last 7 months. The Phase 2 Contractors will install their Prototypes in the SNCF controlled lab environment, directly connected to 50 cameras from the real CCTV system of Paris Nord Station. The goal is to measure and verify the technical performance of each solution in real conditions (Factory Acceptance Test), and their readiness for a pre-operational deployment.

During Phase 2, the Public Buyers will request from the contractors a series of deliverables in order to evaluate their progress based on a predefined set of criteria. On completion of Phase 2, the R&D providers will each deliver the End of Phase 2 deliverables requested by the Consortium, describing the performed activities and the obtained results of Phase 2, the IPR, ethics and security handling and an updated business/commercialisation plan.

If it sounds interesting to you, follow the PREVENT PCP online channels on LinkedIn & Twitter to stay updated!

PREVENT PCP is about to enter Phase 2 of the project. But for now, let’s find out what are the results of the first Phase. We had a chance to speak with Armand Raudin – the Chairman of the Technical Management Committee (TMC)* in PREVENT PCP project.

1. What is the current status of the PCP process undertaken by PREVENT PCP?

We have selected six Contractors and over eighteen proposals to enter Phase 1 (Solution Design) after the launch of the tender last year. During this phase, we have organized bi-weekly meetings with Contractors.

During those sessions, specialists worked on the detailed requirements and the building of the solutions that could meet PREVENT PCP challenges, such as detection features, tracking of the owner features, and crisis management, as well as technical, hardware, and security features. Those meetings helped the PREVENT PCP consortium and the Contractors to design the future solution. To conclude Phase 1, Contractors submitted their “End of Phase 1” reports, which were assessed by the TMC members.

2. Which aspects were taken into account when evaluating applications?

The TMC has evaluated multiple aspects:

• The Contractor's Technical Plan (how they address our requirements, their solution proposal, etc.),
• The updated commercialization plan (Venture Capital engagement, market analysis),
• The updated innovation plan,
• The updated data management plan,
• The ethics compliance,
• The risk management plan for Ethical,
• GDPR-related issues and the IPRs management plan.

3. Which Consortia were qualified for the next stage of work?

The assessment of Phase 1 had two goals. The first one was to evaluate the progress of the Contractors’ work in Phase 1 (satisfactory work). The second objective was to define if the contractors had successfully completed Phase 1, and are eligible for Phase 2 tender.

After the TMC evaluation and PEC approbation, out of six contractors, five were selected to be eligible for the Phase 2 tender. Those were the DAIMON Consortium, Protecting Railway Transportation via Artificial Intelligence Consortium, BULL SAS Atos, PANOPTES Consortium, and AI-Transportation Consortium.

4. What was the main challenge faced by the project team until now?

The PREVENT PCP project gathers 22 partners, including 11 Public Buyers. As a part of Phase 3, the pilots will take place in four countries with six Public Transport Operators (PTO) and seven pilot sites.

Thus, one of the main challenges was to define the common needs and requirements for the future solution, as well as the functional and technical needs, hardware and cybersecurity requirements, and specificities of the environment of the 6 PTOs involved in the pilots. This challenge impacted the Contractors as well. They had to adapt their solutions, hardware, and implementation plans to the number of cameras, image quality, and the technical environment of each PTO. The involvement of four different countries also led to a legal framework analysis per country, to define what is authorized by the national laws.

5. The PCP works are still ongoing. However, did the project team draw any conclusions regarding the usefulness of the PCP process in the context of public buyers’ needs?

The 3-year PREVENT PCP project is halfway through, and we have some intermediate conclusions regarding the PCP process. Phase 1 dedicated to Solution Design, helped in understanding the solutions by facing the requirements of the projects to the Contractors’ solutions and proposals.

The discussions with the Contractors allowed the Public Buyers to have a first view of several possible solutions with mock-ups, and to be convinced (or not) about their capabilities to develop the solution in the following phases. Hence, the first PCP phase was interesting for Public Buyers to concretely confront their needs for the R&D capabilities on the market. So, even at this early stage of the project, the benefits of the PCP process for Public Buyers are important.

6. What are the next steps?

Five Contractors have submitted their offer for the Call-off for Phase 2, and by the end of May, TMC members will evaluate their technical offers. Selected Contractors will enter Phase 2 dedicated to the prototype development, installation of the solutions in SNCF premises, and prototype evaluation. This phase is a challenge for the PREVENT PCP consortium and the Contractors, who will develop their solutions based on the design confirmed in Phase 1. The prototypes will be installed and connected to real cameras of Paris Nord station (SNCF) and provide the first view of the successful implementation of the solutions during two months of technical tests. In 2024, as a part of Phase 3 of the PCP, the best prototypes will be operationally tested in four countries: France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal.

Armand Raudin is the Head of the Video & Innovation Program in the SNCF Security Directorate. Within PREVENT PCP project, he plays the role of the Chairman of the Technical Management Committee. Over the last few years, he conducted experiments on video analytics. He went through many use cases that led him to better understand the technologies and the maturity of the market.

* TMC gathers 11 representatives of PREVENT PCP Public Buyers. Its role is to assist the Procurement Evaluation Committee (PEC) activities for all the technical aspects of the project. The TMC reviews the documentation submitted by the contractors within all PCP phases, verifies the compliance of the products with the technical requirements, expresses comments and, taking into account the remarks of the industry and finally proposes to the PEC the acceptance or the rejection of the deliverables submitted by the contractors. The TMC Chairman consolidates the partners opinions and ratings, and lead the technical discussions with TMC members.

The main core of PREVENT PCP is conducting an innovation pre-commercial procurement procedure. This is a method for contracting authorities to the technologies’ acquisition.

We have already presented the main assumptions of applications submitted by most of the awarded Contractors. The last of them is the AI-Transportation Consortium. The works are carried out by A.I. Tech srl, SAET SpA. How are they going to respond to the challenges identified by the PREVENT team? 

AI-Transportation proposed a modular solution composed of different modules for people / item detection & tracking, behaviour analysis, people re-identification and crisis management. The technology will be realized using the software framework of A.I. Tech that have been extended and consolidated over the years and allows to run the analytics software modules on more than 20 hardware platforms.

Moreover, using the framework will make the analytics modules able to send alarms and notifications using the most common standard network protocols (including MQTT, HTTP and ModBUS/TCP) and with more than 10 Video Management Systems.

The proposed solutions will still be compliant with GDPR and will not require the use of external cloud services, allowing the customer to decide where to deploy each component of the system, from the video analytics application to the crisis management and where to store the data.

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. 

The identification of unattended objects is one of the main challenges in providing safety in public transport. This is the main reason why we implemented the PREVENT PCP project.

We are constantly making progress in our work and the first phase of the pre-commercial procurement, during which the Contractors work on solutions design. Among six of them, there is a solution that is being developed by the PANOPTES Consortium. It consists of the following partners: Herta Security S.L., ChapsVision and ACIC SA.

PANOPTES implements the state of the art in artificial intelligence-assisted video surveillance, and addresses the most demanded challenges in crowded public spaces. The environment to be monitored is one of the most challenging spaces, with multiple entrances and exits, and massive arrival of passengers.

The purpose of PANOPTES is the control and early detection of security threats, alerting of situations identified as dangerous. Abandonment of bulky objects inside trains, in passenger transit areas or identification of criminals and wanted terrorists can create some risks that can be mitigated by the proposed solution.

It will have a positive impact and greatly increase the security of train stations and similar spaces. In addition, the tracking of forgotten objects will be reported along with photographs.

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. 

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.

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:

• Improving the security of goods and people in particular by enabling an earlier detection of any unattended item; and ending of the procedure in the first 15 minutes by locating the owner
• Limiting traffic disruption 
• Improving the efficiency of the management of the PTO security missions

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

• Timely automatic detection of potentially dangerous unattended items in Public Transport Infrastructure and in public areas in the vicinity
• Identification and tracking of perpetrators
• Integration/interoperability of the technology in standard crisis management systems and Video Management System (VMS)

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. 

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.

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.