Relevance

Airports are nation-critical transportation facilities, centers of internal and external communications. By ensuring continuous air traffic, airports play a major role in combating terrorism, international crime and illegal immigration.

The overall safety of passengers and freight, efficient control of their flows, extensive deployment of new generation e-documents enhanced with biometrics – these are the primary challenges and priorities of airport activities.

Airport activities are extremely comprehensive and diverse. Daily, airports handle many passengers and those that see them off and welcome them; additional flows involve operating personnel, airline staff and crew teams, tenants, company car drivers, etc.

Apart from transportation functions, airports are also responsible for customs clearance and border control functions. To perform efficiently, airports are equipped with state-of-the-art information systems and, in addition, the sensitive zones of airports should be securely protected against unauthorized access.

Biometric identification technologies are extensively deployed in airports across the world. The key tasks carried out by biometrics in airports are as follows:

• Ensure the overall safety of passengers and air transportation;
• Increase the comfort level and accelerate the servicing of passengers (while retaining the required security level);
• Restrict access to personnel facilities and sensitive airport zones;
• Promptly identify the passengers, staff and other persons within the territory of an airport;
• Secure corporate data of airline and management companies.

Project References

• A frequent traveler program in the US allows the acceleration of immigration control procedures by using fingerprint and iris biometrics (over 55 thousand users;
• Fingerprint identification of passengers registering luggage for domestic SAS flights in Sweden and Norway;
• Restricted Area Identity Card program (RAIC) in Canada is an access control system designed for 29 international airports, identifying airport staff by fingerprints and iris samples (up to 100 thousand employees;
• A biometric T&A system for employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of the USA, encompassing 450 airports, 55 thousand employees, performs biometric identification by fingerprints.

BioLink offers for airports the following solutions:

• BioLink AMIS, an automated multi-biometric information system (for integration into frequent traveler programs);
• BioTime, a biometric T&A and access control system;
• BioLink U-Match, a fingerprint scanner;
• BioLink U-Match BI, embedded fingerprint scanners (to be incorporated into information kiosks and similar equipment);
• BioLink IDenium, a biometric identification corporate software;
• BioLink Authenteon, a biometric identification server;
• BioLink SDK, a software development toolkit for applications requiring strong identification.