Airports represent key hubs in the international transport system. Any disruption of critical airport infrastructure may thus have disastrous and wide-ranging consequences. Disruptions may be in the form of illegal intrusion and trespassing on airport grounds or unauthorised parking of vehicles or placing of objects in restricted or critical airside areas, e.g. taxiways.
Because airport areas of regional airports are inspected only visually by the air-controllers, situations with line-of-sight obstructions are very critical.
The primary goal to improve safety at airports is the prevention of critical incidents that are a threat to human life (passengers, airport staff, abutting owners) the environment and the airport operating facilities. As a secondary goal, the impacts of critical incidents that have already happened should be kept as low as possible. Most of the systems currently in use are based on unimodal data, which means that they evaluate data of only one type of sensor (e.g. video cameras) and do not take signals from other sensors into account.
The goal of this project is to develop a demonstration system of a multimodal system for the efficient monitoring of “large areas” like the areas of airports but also refineries, power plants, etc. By the use of different sensor-types and a smart combination of the results of detection, in future more stable and reliable systems for airport area monitoring should be provided. By this means new and complementary sources of information will be opened which will cause a significant increase of the detection rate and therefore an increase of the security and safety of airports respectively.
The intention of the project is to check the functionality, performance and the capability of the demonstration system for a multimodal monitoring system in consideration of economic aspects. Further the social aspects (privacy protection of staff and passengers, apperception of risk) will be examined in a separate work package within the project.
 
The project is funded by the security research funding programme KIRAS by the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT).