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Accenture worked with the UK Border Agency to help London Stansted Airport test automated clearance gates for European Economic Area passengers, using e-passports and biometric face recognition.
On the Web: http://www.stanstedairport.com
The trial demonstrated that automated border clearance can indeed help to increase security, improve efficiency and provide a better experience for travelers.
London Stansted Airport (STN) is the United Kingdom’s busiest single-terminal airport in Europe, serving approximately 10.5 million arriving passengers annually. The airport operator, BAA, wanted to explore automated border clearance solutions to deal with the long line of travellers waiting in the Immigration Hall at peak times.
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BAA’s London Stansted Airport experiences significant peaks and troughs of arriving passengers, driven by low-cost carriers’ schedules. Consequently, long queues can form at peak periods in the Immigration Hall and BAA wanted to explore the opportunities that an automated border clearance solution could provide.
As BAA had already worked with Accenture on the successful miSense Trial at London Heathrow’s Terminal 3 in 2006-7, it embarked on a project to test automated border clearance of European Economic Area travelers holding first-generation electronic passports at the UK border using self-service gates and face recognition.
Accenture worked with BAA and UKBA to create a secure, streamlined and workable business process to automate the border crossing, and designed the enabling technical solution. The solution was then built and tested at Accenture Technology Labs in France before being deployed to London Stansted Airport in late 2008.
The Automated Border Clearance (ABC) trial at Stansted deployed a bank of six automated gates that captured a real-time image of a travelers’ faces and compared this with the digital facial image stored on their e-passport microchips. The system also checked the validity and authenticity of the e-passport and conducted background checks to confirm that the individual is permitted to enter the country. If these checks were satisfactory, the automated gate would open and the traveler would enter the United Kingdom. The gates were supervised by a border officer using a touch-driven monitoring station.
The automated border clearance trial system was custom-developed for BAA by Accenture, building on solutions and experience from automated border clearance and biometric-related projects around the world. Development of the trial was carried out in collaboration with CrossMatch Technologies, 3M Rochford Thompson and IER/Automatic Systems, with BAA and UKBA as key stakeholders.
"By using new technology we are helping make our border even more secure, making the United Kingdom safer, speeding up travel for passengers and improving our service to the public."— Barry McGill, assistant director for the UK Border Agency at Stansted Airport.
For the airport operator, BAA, the trial demonstrated the viability of the concept of Automated Border Clearance in its airport, with efficiencies in both floor space and throughput.
For the border control authority, UKBA, it has shown that the increasingly widespread deployment of biometric travel documents can increase security, improve efficiency and facilitate travel.
For the passengers, the trial offered a straightforward, efficient and rapid path through border control. Of the 362 travellers surveyed:
The success of the trial confirmed that automated border clearance is the way forward, offering an effective solution to process large volumes of low-risk travelers while focusing on intelligence-led border control. As a result of the trial, BAA and UK Border Agency are deploying permanent automated border clearance gates at London Heathrow and Stansted, which will cover 54 percent of all incoming passenger traffic to the United Kingdom.