By Calvin Biesecker
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has acquired space in the Washington, D.C., area to house an operational testing facility for checked baggage and checkpoint security systems, giving it the ability to explore how different technologies and systems could work without necessarily doing similar testing at an airport and potentially disrupting operations, according to agency officials.
The integration facility would allow TSA to test various concepts such as rerouting checked bags within a baggage handling system between an in-line Explosives Detection System (EDS) and an X-Ray Advanced Technology (AT) machine depending on a particular security protocol or threat, Mike Golden, TSA’s assistant administrator for operational process and technology, said on Monday at the American Association of Airport Executives Aviation Security Summit.
“What we need to be able to do is come up with viable solutions within an in-line system as far as the routing of bags and the ability to switch protocols of machines and route those to the appropriate place,” Golden said.
TSA hopes to have the two-story, 128,000 square foot integration facility operating by next August. The agency issued a sources sought notice in the FedBizOpps last Friday to identify small businesses that could do the design and build-out of the facility, provide operations and maintenance support and systems integration services.
“One of the things you don’t want us to do, for example, is to play out our concepts of operations and testing our systems in your busy outbound system,” Roger Dickey, TSA’s deputy chief technology officer, told airport executives at the AAAE meeting.
Golden sees the new facility as more than just a way to test concepts and examine how various screening technologies could work together. It would also be a place where TSA pre-certifies proven concepts so that airports, especially smaller ones, could choose from based on their needs, he said.
Airports would have a “catalog” of options of pre-certified systems that could be adopted more quickly, Golden said.
TSA also sees opportunities to explore ways to improve efficiency and security at passenger checkpoints.
“There may be opportunities for linking and integrating certain checkpoint technologies to increase situational awareness across the board and to increase throughput,” Dickey said.
Both Golden and Dickey couched their discussion of the integration facility in part on the a risk-based dynamic approach to security screening. Dickey said that for this to become a reality there needs to be “sufficient rigor associated with the technologies that we link and that we call a system.”