Intelligent Framework for Port Security

In the case of Port and Harbor Security

Mindware Framework provides a unique highly collaborative platform that easily integrates systems, technologies and devices that comprise the complex solutions necessary for today’s Port Security.

Mindware’s scalable platform will continue to meet the ever increasing need for the integration of key technologies for turn-key solutions, related services and components to more quickly deploy critical port security solutions.

Mindware’s platform accesses, monitors and automatically correlates critical information residing in disparate systems crossing domains and jurisdictions presenting a common operational view for unified situational awareness that supports decision acuity.

The Challenges

The maritime supply chain includes federal, regional, state, local, private and corporate ports, as well as vessels and facilities of the US and foreign governments. Every organization in the supply chain needs to be integrated into the overall security framework to do the following:

• Quickly detect and report threats and emergency events.
• Share and analyze information with affected and responsible parties
• Initiate active responses.
• Initiate recovery processes. The security framework should provide multi-tiered levels of domain and shared situational awareness that is appropriate for the locations and organizations involved their personnel, and their roles and responsibilities.

Domain Awareness Challenges

One of the most fundamental challenges to ensuring maritime domain awareness is the true integration into a comprehensive, functional, inter-networkedSystem of Systems. That is, a system that provides bi-directional flow of status, data, decisions, and actions by the appropriate jurisdictional and supply chain elements at every level. The system must be able to use information from trusted and secure sources (such as Homeland Security) and be able to detect, analyze, and respond to locally acquired information and intelligence. This system must also be able to integrate and interact with other local security systems that are already active or being designed (video surveillance, bio-identification, sensor systems, etc) and with locally derived incident information, as well as real time information sources specific to the local environment (radio and TV broadcasts, local web sites, local traffic and transportation sources, other public facing information sources (hospitals, power companies, telecomm services, weather, etc) .

It also must also provide regional or port-related organizations with easily understood and actionable locally-initiated threat analysis, detection and response capabilities.

A Multi-tiered Awareness and Automated Response Operationally, there are significant challenges in controlling and managing detection, analysis, and response in all layers of the port security framework. The higher tier agencies (DHS, Intelligence Agencies and Federal Maritime) and their associated mid-tier agencies (USCG, CBP, TSA) are equipped centrally with automated systems, staffing, and communications mechanisms to support their domain awareness, analysis, and response roles.

For instance, at a national level, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses its Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC) to:

1. Monitor vulnerabilities and incidents nationwide,
2. Constructs nationwide visual picture of the current threat situation,
3. Performs first level assessments of threats,
4. Maintains communication, tracks and shares a “common operating picture” of the situation with the White House and other senior officials, and
5. Sets threat conditions and disseminates threat information to many other federal, state, local and urban center partners to enable the implementation of their plans and protective measures.

However, these capabilities do not extend to the local operational level (specific area and port level) where a significant gap exists in the ability of these “down stream” entities to have a similar capability that integrates and fuses information from all sources including locally-derived information.

Mindware’s platform would provide ports and their geographically located federal, state and local partners with an enhanced, sharable, “local common operational picture” enabling them to quickly obtain a locally enhanced picture of an incident(s), make informed decisions, and more quickly respond to and mitigate threats or potential threats in their domain.

Enhanced Security with Active Awareness and Response

With Mindware’s platform, policies and procedures that address the needs of each entity or organization can be rapidly setup and tested then provide continuous monitoring of conditions and/or information that would “trigger” a process to perform a variety of functions on behalf of the community affected.

Mindware’s Platform snapshot:

• Monitorinformation from any type of information source ( systems, applications, devices, audio, video, text, graphics)
• Triggerthe appropriate action or process
• Automatically notify and alert the proper recipients (email, voice call, instant message, audible alarm, etc)
• Dynamically create a sharable, multi-dimensional situational awareness display that combines information from multiple data sources and for multiple data, mines web sources for other relevant information, further analyzes/processes the acquired information, visualizes and overlays information on maps and other geo-spatial media.
• Automatically setup a collaborative communications environment (voice or video conference bridge) for members of a specific entity or escalate it to involve multiple entity participants.
• Track and update monitored and mined information on a continuous basis as the plan proceeds
• Maintain and record an audit trail of the plan triggers, decisions, actions and responses
• Enable external reporting and recording of related observations and reports via voice call, mobile device and cameras.
• Provide “active” decision support through operator selection and activation of other available automated plans on a local or remote basis.
• Provide highly scalable, real time communication infrastructure supporting high volume outbound notification calling, emailing and instant messaging, faxing, etc.
• Provide “always on” teleworker and remote worker support through permission-based, secure web access to any type of application (Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mainframe, Midframe and MacIntosh).
• Virtual fencing and rule based triggers/alarms that use a combination of radar, AIS, and cameras for 24X7 unmanned surveillance and automatic intruder detection.
• Security Zone management
• Acts as a Command and Control (C2) display, fusing sensors and data to share and distribute alerts, video, situational displays, and other information among diverse stakeholder groups in net centric command center mode as well as web enabled modes through local intranets and/or securely extended through the Internet
• Integrate Intelligent Video, including web enabled video and geo located video
• Integrate Underwater swimmer detection technologies
• Integrate mobile patrol boat and vehicle identification – track position, provide mobile C2 display, and mobile camera view and send PDA / cell phone mobile video viewing and sending by boarding officers and others
• Integrate Perimeter and Access Control technologies
• Integrate Dockside and perimeter monitoring and intruder detection technologies
• Integrate Security Zone, alarms and automatic mass notification technologies
• Provide Incident reporting
• Integrate PDA / cell phone mobile video viewing and sending by patrolling assets
• Integrate 3d Geospatial intelligence technologies
• Collaborate with other integrated Command Centers with data and sensor fusion as well as alerts and display distribution
• Mobile patrol boat and vehicle integration – track position, provide mobile display, and mobile camera view and send
• Schedule optimization and de-confliction
• Pilot scheduling
• Integration of NOAA PORTS real-time tides and currents and vessel schedules
• Pilot, tugs, stevedores, berths, sea marshals, etc. scheduling and management
• Asset management
• Billing interface to local financial accounting systems
• Reporting and analysis
• Vessel Schedule Management

Other Information Sharing and Collaboration

• Document sharing and collaboration
• Area event planning and sharing calendar
• Port security forums
• Mindware’s Intelligent Framework is an unsurpassed solution for unifying the efforts of all organizations and participants involved in port security and related security requirements and practices at the local, regional, state, and national levels. It is a highly survivable, scalable, event-driven architecture incorporating a concurrent/parallel processing framework.

An Important Understanding of Mindware’s Intelligent Framework Mindware’s Intelligent Framework links to virtually every electronic system, sensor and database found in the supply chain taking intelligent, conditional and coordinated actions on all information data sources and systems. By using the Intelligent Agents, a business analyst can define custom business rules that can read and update data, make real time decisions and take actions across a wide variety of systems. They include reading and writing data and taking actions on XML/SOAP web servers, HTML web sites, Legacy systems (mainframe/AS400/SNA), ODBC databases (Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, DB2, Adabas, Informix etc.), Lotus Notes applications, ERP systems (SAP, PeopleSoft etc.), X12 EDIs, GUIs of client-server applications, Applets, custom APIs of third party systems, files, spreadsheets, PDF files, Visio diagrams, MS Project plans, message queues, images (using OCR), faxes, Sensing Instruments, e-mails and voice mails. The output result from this custom application processing can be fed immediately to other systems or presented on browsers, PDA’s and other hand-held devices, e-mails, beepers, faxes, and voice-mail. Applications can also be instructed to seek and wait for human intervention/response when required. All interactions with these systems (including web based HTML and XML systems) is defined and executed via visual wizards without needing programming in a conventional programming language. Typically no change is needed to the existing application being accessed.

The Mindware Intelligent Framework development environment offers a full feature IDE (Interactive Design Environment) with Intelligent Agents to allow users to quickly convert ANY business intent into Business Process automation instructions. ANY business logic, however simple or complex, can be deployed with a few clicks of the mouse. Each Agent accomplishes the work equivalent to thousands of lines of conventional code. The business workflow can be “debugged” by using built-in visual testing facilities similar to those offered by other interactive programming languages like Visual Basic. Like all other features of Mindware’s Intelligent Framework the testing facility is 100% visual point-and-click. Extensive context specific on-line help is available with each Agent. Visual cut, copy and paste facilities are available to quickly change the business rules when the business reality and requirement changes. No knowledge of a programming language is needed.

The Mindware Intelligent Framework includes 100% point-and-click Intelligent Agents to extract data from difficult sources like PDF files, images (using OCR – Optical Character Recognition), faxes and message queues. Advanced actions include automatically putting transaction specific data in HTML/XML web sites and pressing correct links and buttons. When the web server responds, the data of interest is automatically extracted and is made available for further actions as specified by the user-entered custom business rules. If the web page layout changes between the time the web interaction was defined and its execution, the Intelligent Agents automatically apply pattern-matching algorithms to cross check the validity of the data being extracted. Situations like longer/shorter paragraphs and more/fewer rows in tables on the web page are automatically handled by the wizards. If the web page changes are so drastic that the business information is no longer present on that web page or if the web address is no longer valid, the Intelligent Agents detect the situation and return appropriate error messages to the business logic so that corrective actions (e.g. going to an alternate web site/server to get the same business information if possible) can be taken as per the business preferences. No coding in a conventional programming language is needed to implement these advanced solutions. The wizards also enable bi-directional Web Service interactions.

The Mindware Intelligent Framework has embedded features that allow connectivity with all Web-based HTML/XML/WML data including quick enabling of multilingual/multi-currency capabilities required by today’s global businesses. Foreign language web data can be included in Web searches, local data can be published in a foreign language and currencies can be converted to one another using spot currency rates using built-in features. Forward currency contract rates can be used if that rate is available on a local system or a Web site.

Additionally, Mindware’s Intelligent Framework offers Intelligent Agents with extremely useful advanced features that are not found in any other programming language or protocol. Examples are advanced multi-language web searches based on custom dynamic criteria and wizards for ANY source-to-XML transformations. Even faxes can be converted to XML.

The market research firm, IDC, predicts the number of wireless devices connected to the Net will be three times greater than the number of PC’s. Mindware’s Intelligent Framework provides built-in features to send customized real time HTML / WML data, SMS messages, faxes and e-mails to hand-held devices like PDA’s and paging equipment, based on customized business rules. Advanced CTI (computer telephony integration) features like “Presence Management” (aka “Follow Me”) and system initiated multi-party conference and IVR calls can be conditionally invoked from the platform by simply clicking on pre-built business level user interfaces. Additionally, Mindware’s platform can automatically start Net Meetings by intelligently locating users across the Internet.

Extended workflow automation

Mindware’s Intelligent Framework employs Process, Resource and Logic Modelers to define combinations of manual and automated workflow segment dependencies of any sophistication to automate and expedite complex workflows in an efficient manner, without program coding. The platform provides for definition of business rules that decide how a long-running business transaction should flow through the organization’s automated and manual decision making over several days. The workflow definition includes:

• Specification of normal business rules for all events in life-span of the transaction
• Exception handling rules
• Senior-authority overrides to normal rules if and when required, subject to permission check
• Automatic re-tries of automated workflow segments when some required systems are down
• Synchronization of results of parallel decision making before a dependent workflow is initiated
• Cancellation of partially processed business transactions under appropriate business conditions
• Scheduling of bulk transaction processing
• Automated e-mail, beeper, pager, cell-phone, Instant Message, Net-Meeting alerts to appropriate parties when needed

After the business workflow dependency definition is configured and activated; all further transactions are automatically routed from one decision-making segment into another according to the clicked-in business rules (business logic). The workflow segments can be manual across many departments and/or automated across many diverse internal or web based partner systems. The automated workflow segments can be triggered by specific business events in the life span of the extended transaction or can be scheduled on a repeating frequency. Automated alerts (via e-mails, Instant Messages, Beeper/cell-phone text messages, Net-Meetings with whiteboard sharing) can be set to inform people about transactions waiting for their review and input. An audit trail is available to trace processing of any business transaction across many workflow segments. All user interaction with the transactions is browser based and is subject to permissions granted to each user.