A passenger flow oriented security and safety approach in international railway stations

TRA 2018, 7th Transport Research Arena, Vienne, AUTRICHE, 16-/04/2018 - 19/04/2018; In the context of the Franco-German research project Re(h)strain, this work focuses on a global system analysis integrating both safety and security analysis of international and/or urban railway stations. The Re(h)strain project focuses on terrorist attacks on high speed train systems and investigates prevention and mitigation measures to reduce the overall vulnerability and strengthen the system resilience. One main criterion regarding public transport issues is the number of passengers. For example, the railway station of Paris 'Gare du Nord' deals with a bigger number of passengers than the biggest airport in the world (SNCF open Data 2014), the Atlanta airport, but in terms of passengers, it is only around the 23rd rank railway station in the world. Due to the enormous mass of people, this leads to the system approach of breaking out the station into several classes of zones, e.g. entrance, main hall, quays, trains, etc. All classes are analysed considering state-of-the-art parameters, like targets attractiveness, feasibility of attack, possible damage, possible mitigation and defences. Then, safety incidence of security defence is discussed in order to refine security requirement with regard to the considered zone. Finally, global requirements of security defence correlated to the corresponding class of zones are proposed. A case study based on the works in Re(h)strain is used as an illustration to demonstrate how the above-mentioned security and safety requirements may be implemented and handled at train stations. Therefore, the different security measures proposed for an unaffected flow of passengers are correlated to existing ones, such as video surveillance and security personal patrolling. The results of sensor set-ups realised within the project and tested in real environment show new ways of implementing innovative techniques to security applications. Depending on the technology, sensor portals at the entrances of train stations or sensor nodes distributed throughout the station increase the level of protection achievable for the detection of threats as part of preventive security concepts. The fusion of data gained by different sensor systems, including person-tracking by non-visual object recognition and trailing, enables a core function of a security assistance system. This assistance system makes security personnel aware of threats and the location of possible carriers of suspicious material as a prior condition to successful intervention measures. The high level of automation reduces human intervention to a minimum. In the conclusion it will be recommended to think of international railway stations as complex interconnected systems which are made for sharing traffic flows. It means that thinking about local solutions may produce safety problems to connected zones due to possible overcrowding. Document type: Conference objec

Localization and tracking of radioactive source carriers in person streams

The localization and tracking of radioactive sources in public facilities like airports or stations is a problem of highest security relevance. The accumulation and the severity of terrorist attacks during the past decade give reason to the assumption that future attacks could also involve radioactive material packaged with conventional explosives. The only way to avoid such kind of attacks is to localize and arrest the person carrying the material to its destination. But since radiation is not perceivable by human beings, the security guards are largely dependent on technical decision support to perform this task. We consider a security assistance system comprising three gamma scintillation detectors that are distributed along a corridor wall to check passing people for radioactive material. Furthermore, the system consists of a set of tracking sensors simultaneously providing the positions of all persons during their walk through the corridor. In this paper we propose techniques to estimate the assignment of radioactive detections to person tracks. These techniques provide a measure for each person that reflects the probability that the person is a radioactive source carrier. The problem of source localization is thus reduced to a matching problem between person tracks and sequences of count rates