The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) last week began conducting market research for a new procurement round for explosives detection systems (EDS) that screen checked baggage at airports for bombs, outlining three categories of throughput requirements including high-speed systems that can scan bags faster than existing equipment.
The Request for Information (RFI) issued through the FedBizOpps.gov website “signals intent of where we’re going with the EDS machines,” Robin Kane, acting assistant administrator for the Office of Process Technology, tells an audience at the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Stakeholders Conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association.
The “market-ready” EDS systems must meet agency requirements for the automated detection of explosives, which basically means the machines need to be able to alert for certain threats. In addition, the solicitation says TSA is interested in three types of systems, high-speed, medium-speed, and reduced-size.
Technical specifications related to the EDS requirements are expected to be available to interested vendors this week. TSA hopes to have a Request for Proposals out some time this year for competitive procurements in all three categories of EDS, Kane says.
Kane also says the RFI and related documents will “talk a little about the threat that we’re currently focused on” and make sure “that we don’t buy capability that can’t evolve to new threats and won’t improve over time.”
The high-speed EDS would be able to automatically detect threats at baggage throughputs of 900 bags or more per hour in inline configurations. No equipment currently meets those requirements although several companies are developing systems that are expected to exceed those throughputs.
The current EDS systems scan far less bags. These systems are supplied by General Electric [GE], L-3 Communications [LLL] and Reveal Imaging Technologies.
GE and L-3 are the only firms supplying EDS in the medium-speed range. TSA recently certified GE’s latest entry into the EDS market, the CTX 9800DSi, which the company says can scan between 700 and 750 bags per hour (TR2, April 1). Those rates would be the highest in TSA’s inventory of EDS.
GE plans on making upgrades so that the CTX 9800 system can eventually scan 1,000 bags per hour, which would mean it can possibly compete for high-speed EDS procurements.
Three other firms are also working on high-speed EDS: L-3; OSI Systems [OSIS] Rapiscan Division; and a small company, SureScan Corp. All three are developing systems that don’t involve a gantry spinning around the luggage as it moves through the scanning tunnel. The stationary gantry systems are expected to not only increase baggage throughput, the companies say they will reduce the operations and maintenance costs associated with the rotating gantry systems that are in the current generation of EDS systems. All three firms received contracts from TSA last year to improve on their respective systems (TR2, Oct. 15, 2008).
Asked whether the fixed-gantry systems are only what TSA is looking at for the high-speed requirements, Kane says that while the technology “has some promise,” it comes down to the technology that meets the requirements is what “we want to buy.”
Jim Tuttle, who heads the Explosives Division within the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology branch, tells TR2 that he doesn’t think the stationary gantry systems will be ready this year. However, OSI Systems has said it expects to begin testing its stationary gantry EDS soon at an airport in the United Kingdom.
For now GE and L-3 would appear to have a lock on the medium-speed market with their existing systems. In the new RFI TSA defines medium-speed EDS as between 400 and 900 bags per hour throughput in inline configurations.
The primary supplier of reduced-sized EDS to TSA and globally is Reveal. The agency defines reduced-size EDS as having throughputs between 100 and 400 bags per hour and a size no larger than 26 feet long by six-feet wide and six-feet high. The systems could be used in stand-alone, partially inline and inline configurations. TSA recently awarded Reveal a $47 million contract for reduced-size systems using funding under the economic stimulus package. Reveal’s CT-80DR can screen 225 bags per hour.
However, TSA recently certified a reduced-size EDS developed by L-3 that the company says and screen between 300 and 360 bags per hour. The agency has purchased some of the systems. GE has also said it plans to develop a reduced-size EDS.
It would seem that the pending EDS competition would rely for its initial funding from the FY ’10 budget. TSA late last year said it plans to award GE and L-3 potential five- year contracts each worth over $300 million as early as next month for their various existing EDS systems, presumably using FY ’09 funds.
In addition to the annual congressional appropriations, there is also funding for EDS purchases in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act approved by Congress this year.