For Industry

Industry Day Meetings

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security are seeking the best technologies, systems, and operational concepts from industry to form a next-generation countermeasure architecture for protecting unstructured crowds from IED attacks.

Developing and Accelerating Technologies

The Department's Science and Technology Directorate develops, tests, and evaluates explosives countermeasure architectures and integrated systems using commercial-off-the-shelf and near-commercial technologies and innovative concepts of operation. The Department provides feedback from testing and evaluation to technology developers to focus and accelerate the development of solutions to address key gaps in countermeasure architecture. The Department also develops test beds, testing protocols, and standards—and in some cases, it may provide funding to test and demonstrate technologies.

Opportunities for the Private Sector - presentation by Thomas Cellucci, Chief Commercialization Office, The Department of Homeland Security (March 2009).

Challenges to Be Overcome for Standoff Detection in Unstructured Crowds

Overcome crowd effects (line of sight and proximity issues)
"Triage" arriving patrons to focus costly, high-performing sensors on people who represent the greatest risk
Automate screening operations to allow operators to focus on managing risk and to increase screening throughput
Reduce labor requirements to make the countermeasure affordable
Improve situational awareness to improve operator effectiveness and countermeasure performance
Design and implement decision support tools to facilitate operator decision-making and threat prioritization
Use in-field law enforcement operators as additional eyes and ears
Ensure scalability and transferability of the integrated architecture to other venues and other unstructured crowd environments

Technology Requirements

Commercial or near-commercial
Remotely operated or standoff technology that enables scanning of unstructured crowds
Outdoor-performing technologies
Manageable probability of false positive alarms
Demonstrated, repeatable ability to detect threat objects/signatures
Safe to public and operators
No privacy concerns
Covert or overt deployment

Ways Industry Can Participate

Participation in STIDP via its technology assessment and selection process. Technologies that are selected by STIDP as part of its countermeasure development and testing activities may be eligible for funding for product maturation and/or system integration.
Participation in R&D activities of other government agencies involved in explosives research, development, testing, and evaluation. STIDP routinely examines the R&D and testing activities of other agencies to identify promising countermeasure (e.g., concealed object detection) and enabling technologies (e.g., people tracking) for integration into its countermeasure architecture.
Participate in the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology's applied counter-IED R&D program. Projects funded under this program are eligible for testing at the Department of Homeland Security's Standoff Detection Test Bed.
Participation in existing and planned government/industry and professional society groups addressing standards, open architecture approaches, and R&D needs and direction.

How to Have Your Technology Product or Operational Approach Considered For Testing

The Department of Homeland Security publishes Requests for Information on FedBizOpps.gov on a regular basis. You can be added to the STIDP industry mailing list by writing to
stidp-communications@pnl.gov. You will be notified of Requests for Information and other upcoming events.

Requests for Information (RFIs)

The following Requests for Information (RFIs) were posted in FedBizOpps in 2009 and are now closed. Some of these may be re-opened, and additional RFIs may be issued in the coming months.

You can also send information about your company directly to STIDP-RFI@pnl.gov.