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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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:

• Detection of unattended items in public spaces and transport Infrastructures
• Identification and tracking of their owners through the existing CCTV system
• Advanced management of alerts, incidents, and crisis

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. 

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.

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.