From Tuesday 16th to Thursday 18th June, the partners involved in Work Package 3 of the PREVENT project connected in Gdansk, Poland, to drive forward the group’s tasks. The meeting was held in a beautiful, old building on ul. Dyrekcyjna, the former headquarters of PKP, a national train provider in Poland, and a partner in the PREVENT project (PKP-SKM).
The PREVENT project focuses on pre-empting attacks in public transport, by enabling early detection of terrorists and potentially dangerous objects. This covers the tracking of detected individuals and or situations and coordinating closely with security forces to diffuse dangerous situations.
This focus is shared, by 22 organisations from 10 countries. These include; public transport operators, security forces, public buyers, city authorities – of which 12 are consortium partners, and 10 are members of the PREVENT User Observatory Group (UOG).
The meeting was an ideal opportunity to update each party on the progress of the individual Work Packages and to discuss any important topics. However, the real focus was to facilitate a workshop.
Workshop Focus Areas
One of the main tasks in WP3 is to implement a progressive and iterative process to deliver 6, jointly defined Common Security Scenarios that capture threats and vulnerabilities.
Defining and elaborating on these potential scenarios formed a large part of this meeting and workshop. Partners from around Europe, including; Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, Poland, France & Italy were joined by the Israeli Police, who are also playing an active part in this innovative initiative.
Together, the group collaborated to extract and share knowledge of previous situations that they’ve faced in their local domains. The practical examples helped to condense experiences into a series of 12 tangible scenarios, which will later be refined to 6 in another work package.
The work isn’t finished, but the meeting certainly assisted the process. Meeting together, sharing information, and personal anecdotes – certainly focuses on the team, who must work closely to execute this crucial task of the project.
Other points also covered during the gathering, were updates on other deliverables from WP 3. This included information relating to the vulnerability and threat taxonomy directly applicable to the public transport world.
For these scenarios, PREVENT will undertake a gap analysis between available solutions, existing standards, on-going research and identified needs, from which a multi-dimensional roadmap of innovations and solutions will be produced.
The highest priority innovations in the roadmap will be selected by practitioners and public buyers to define a ‘Common Challenge’ to form a basis for a subsequent PCP (Pre-Commercial Procurement).
