On 23 and 24 September, the SafeTravellers consortium gathered at the Academy of the Police Force in Bratislava for the final pilot demonstration of the project. Two intensive days of testing in a static airport environment were led, hosted and organised by the Bureau of Border and Foreign Police of the Presidium of the Police Force of the Slovak Republic, whose team built the setting, coordinated the volunteers and kept the schedule running from the first enrolment to the last.
The purpose of the exercise was to place the SafeTravellers technologies in a setting that reproduces the conditions of an operational border crossing point. Volunteers were enrolled and processed as passengers while border guards and technical partners ran the verification workflow through a defined series of scenarios, including deliberate attempts to defeat the system.
Working through the full sequence repeatedly, over two days rather than in isolated demonstrations, was what made the exercise informative: it generated a substantial volume of measurements, which now join the data gathered during the railway pilot in Paris and the maritime and land border demonstration in Constanța to form the evidence base for the final assessment of the project’s results.
This was the second time practitioners had assessed these tools. Phase 1, conducted last year, identified where individual components needed adjustment and where the workflow slowed under operational pressure; the intervening months went into acting on those findings. What was tested in Bratislava was therefore an already revised system, and the feedback gathered there measures how far the revisions went.
Alongside the quantitative data, the pilot gave the consortium direct access to the judgement of the practitioner who would ultimately use these tools, with participants shared their observations in structured feedback sessions at the end of each day.
Those insights will inform the conclusions the project draws about the operational readiness of its solutions.
Bratislava closes the SafeTravellers pilot campaign, which tested the project’s technologies across every environment foreseen in its validation plan: railway premises in Paris in June, maritime and land border crossing points in Constanța in July, and now an airport setting in Slovakia. With all pilot activities complete, the consortium turns to the final validation and assessment of the project’s results. These will be presented at the joint final conference with EINSTEIN project, in Brussels on 2 and 3 December.
Stay tuned for more.
SafeTravellers completes its pilot campaign in Bratislava, with two successful days of testing
