Airports and sensitive sites

The world’s airports now handle more than four billion passengers every year. The largest individual airports now manage up to 200,000 people each day, and they’re the size of small cities with sites that cover tens of square kilometres.

Thales already addresses the need for security in some of the world’s busiest and most complex international airports, including Doha in Qatar and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. And it is building on this expertise with Thales Hypervisor, a new control centre architecture for large and complex sites.

Transforming supervision
Many airports lack an overarching security control framework. “When an incident occurs today, the problem is being able to understand what happens, to communicate and work together to resolve the incident” says Christine Riveau, Market Development Manager, Thales. “What’s needed is a shared situation awareness and the ability to co-ordinate actions.”

Thales Hypervisor is based on open architecture and this makes it possible to transform security management to successfully create a knowledge advantage for airport operators and security stakeholders with a clear situational awareness.

“You need to be able to detect and identify an incident, qualify the incident and locate it” says Ms. Riveau. “Thales Hypervisor makes it possible to harness existing systems such as video surveillance, access control, passenger information, intrusion and fire detection, that Thales integrates in a network centric environment. Synthesising this data provides the capacity to monitor and manage situations.” 

Data exchange
The internal hierarchy of airports varies enormously between different jurisdictions. Airport operators, security forces, government agencies, first responders and airline companies all have different supervision needs.

Thales Hypervisor meets those needs, while allowing stakeholders to maintain their functional independence. “Our role is to facilitate the customer’s need to exchange information with other institutions, other departments, other terminals and even other airports” explains Ms. Riveau. “People need to be able to exchange information, not change their missions.”

To create the right system for each customer, Thales has developed a new methodology. “We call this Thales IDEA – Identify, Develop, Experiment, Assess” explains Ms. Riveau. “If you really want to embed the appropriate processes in the solution, the right consultative approach is essential.” 

The need to know
Thales Hypervisor meets a wide range of critical needs. In the event of a crisis, for example, it allows stakeholders to share the same vision with a readily understandable human-machine interface (HMI).

It also speeds-up event resolution. “Parallel actions reduce event resolution lead-time: if you can send in the fire brigade and police to resolve a situation simultaneously, it’s much more efficient” stresses Ms. Riveau. “Thales Hypervisor provides this capacity to orchestrate responses.”

The solution also enhances the efficiency of day-to-day operations. “Better automation of routine actions means it’s possible to handle greater numbers of passengers with the same infrastructure” says Ms. Riveau.

Efficient supervision reduces operator workload – and that has important staffing implications. “Operators have the option to re-allocate supervisory manpower to provide more passenger-facing services, such as screening” notes Ms. Riveau.

And Thales Hypervisor has important implications for operations beyond airport security. Because the solution makes it possible to orchestrate information in different forms from a wide range of sources, it could provide the foundations for seamless co-ordination of airport operations amongst airport operators, air traffic control and ground handlers.